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• Jesus is great — is there a better role model? No. It's religion, it's the people who get in between — the bureaucracy, you know. ... It's the way people abuse Jesus. Was there ever a greater victim of name dropping?
  • Be More Cynical (2000) - YouTube clip "Bill Maher on Jesus"
  • Variants: I love Jesus. I just don’t like the Christians who don’t believe in what he says.
    • 'Realtime (7 October 2005)
  • Jesus, as a philosopher is wonderful. There's no greater role model, in my view, than Jesus Christ. It's just a shame that most of the people who follow him and call themselves Christians act nothing like him.
    • Interviewed on The O'Reilly Factor (26 September 2006) - YouTube clip "Fox's O'Reilly: Bill Maher Looks Bigoted Not John Rocker?"

• We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, that's not cowardly. Stupid maybe, but not cowardly.
  • Politically Incorrect, September 17, 2001

• I think we need to change that old saying, "I don't need a building to fall on me." Because two did and we still don't get it. I think we all stick our head in the sand as a deep human impulse.
  • When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism (2002)

• Let's make a law that gay people can have birthdays, but straight people get more cake — you know, to send the right message to kids.
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    • Government -- they used to teach it in college. It's actually something you should study and learn and know how to do. The Republicans always run on the idea that government isn't very effective. Well, not the way you do it. But it can be effective.
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        • If I thought the Lord was speaking to me I'd check myself into Bellevue, and I think you should too.
          • Larry King Live, 11 August 2005; in response to a called-in question if he would become a believer if the Lord spoke to him
        
        

        Be More Cynical (2000)

        • Please stop assuming that longevity and perfect health is always the correct option. No. Sometimes fun costs ya. It just does, you know? And that's OK, you're willing to make that purchase. Sammy Davis, Jr. was 64 when he died. Give me 64 Sammy-years, I'll be happy.
        
        
        • If ketchup had 1/20th of the carcinogens in a cigarette they'd rip it off the shelves tomorrow, so the government is full of shit when they tell you that they care about you.
        
        
        • I'll clue you in on a secret: death is not the worst thing that could happen to you. I know we think that; we are the first society ever to think that. It's not worse than dishonor; it's not worse than losing your freedom; its not worse than losing a sense of personal responsibility.
        
        
        • We're so inconsistent about what we let kill ya. "Smoking? Must be eradicated. Marijuana? Zero tolerance." But there's lots of ways to kill yourself. You know what I think kills you? Stress, and never getting laid, and, uh, McDonalds, and staying mad at people, and lying for a living, and three-martini lunches, and the all-American breakfast, and whatever shit Elvis was doing.
        
        
        • I'm a libertarian, which means I'm against the government doing almost anything. But citizens having arsenals? No, that is the kind of rough stuff I would like the government to get involved in....It just seems the debate, --you know, they will not give an inch. There are many attempts to pass a law in states just requesting a limit of buying one gun a month, and it doesn't pass. People are like, "What about Christmas?" I mean, one gun a month. If you started when you were 18, by the time you were 60 that's over a thousand guns. I don't care how small your penis is, that should be enough guns.
        
        

        Victory Begins at Home (January 20, 2004)

        • How does a country get away with keeping half its population in beekeeper suits? I'll tell you how. They say the magic word: religion. It's their religion. You say religion, you can get away with anything. The Catholics got away with fucking kids, for crying out loud!
        
        
        • I would say that the feminine values are now the values of America; sensitivity is more important than truth; feelings are more important than facts; commitment is more important than individuality; children are more important than people; safety is more important than fun. I always hear women say, "Y'know, married men live longer." Uh, yes, and an indoor cat...also...lives longer. It's a fur-ball with a broken spirit that can only look out on a world it will never enjoy, but it does technically live longer.
        
        
        • You know, if you're an American and you're born at this time in history especially, you're lucky. We all are. We won the world history Powerball lottery, but a little modesty about it might keep the heat off of us. I can't stand the people who say things like, "We built this country!" You built nothing. I think the railroads were pretty much up by 1980.
        
        
        • What I have against religion is that they start you when you are so defenseless. I mean, I was three when they started pumping this bullshit into my head. I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade!
        
        
        • Now if you're just out of the mainstream, if you don't have blind Bush love, you are somehow suspect. Don't ever let them tell you that. Be out of the mainstream. I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream? When Ronald Reagan was running, he would always say 'it's morning in America' and everybody would smile and I would think 'yeah but, I'm not a morning person'. I'm the guy who thinks religion is bad and drugs are good. I think children aren't innocent, god doesn't write books, and Jesus wasn't a republican. I think girls hate each other, no doesn't mean no and being drunk is funny. I'm for mad cow disease, how am I gonna win that? I'm against suing tobacco companies. I think abstinence is a perversion. I think Bush's lies are worse than Clinton's. I think Vegas was better when it was run by the mob. I think men are only as loyal as their options. I think stereotypes are true and rehab is for quitters.
        
        

        I'm Swiss (2005)

        • I wouldn't touch a hot dog unless you put a condom on it! You realize that the job of a hot dog is to use parts of the animal that the Chinese can't figure out how to make into a belt? -timecode 1:11:10
        
        
        • I'd like to protect children, too, but… is everything worth sacrificing to that? I mean, drugs have done a lot of good. […] They've midwived a lot of good ideas… lot of great songs, you know? I think "Penny Lane" is worth 10 dead kids. […] I think Dark Side of the Moon is worth 100 dead kids. There, I said it.
        
        
        • Rush Limbaugh, a man who has made a career out of saying that all drug users must go right to jail, do not pass go, no questions asked, gets caught doing thirty oxycontin a day. Thirty oxycontin? Do you have any idea how high that is? I don't, and I've been pretty high.
        
        
        • Reality television is not good, clean fun. It's cruelty, and people enjoying cruelty.
        
        
        • We do it all the time, we legislate taste. We do it with the tax code. Churches and children get a tax break, because it's assumed that we all agree that we want to encourage churches and children. I don't. I don't. That's my opinion. I don't want to encourage either churches or children, and it's a very bad idea to put them together.
        
        

        The Decider (July 21, 2007)

        • The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them.
        
        
        • Republicans say that sex is bad, because with them it always is. I'm sorry, but they're just doughy, asexual, wonky, white people, and if you had to have sex with them it would be over in an excruciating three minutes. It's just, --and from the headlines of the past year I gather the only sex they're really good at, is gay sex. Really. Jeff Gannon in the White House press room, Representative Mark Foley, the Reverend Ted Haggert. I mean, that's an awful lot of gay when you're running against it in every election.
        
        
        • I was just at the newly opened Creationist Museum in Kentucky.... And they have this exhibit of a giant dinosaur...with a saddle on its back. Because the world is only 5000 years old, so man and the dinosaurs had to coexist, and, of course, we rode them. A theory I thought laughable at the age of eight when I saw it on THE FLINTSTONES!
        
        
        • I wish someone would just start Fly At Your Own Risk Airlines. How 'bout that? You can have your hair gel, you can have your lighter, you can have a fucking gun, how bout that? You can show up at the gate five minutes before the plane leaves, and pay in cash, like in the good ol' 1980s. The ticket just says "shit happens" on the back, because that's the way it is anyway.
        
        
        • It's so childish, "greatest country in the world." It's like saying, "I have the best wife in the world. Not just the one best suited for me, the best wife in the world. And if you could have my wife, you'd kill your wife."
        
        

        Real Time with Bill Maher

        • That’s America for you — a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald’s, Marlboro and K Street. And recently, there’s been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death. They’re called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than in any month in the past three years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go? When will our closeted gay congressmen learn? Our boys aren’t for pleasure. They’re for cannon fodder. They shouldn’t be another notch on your bedpost. They should be a comma in Bush’s war. If I hear a zipper, it had better be on a body bag. Why aren’t Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we’re supposed to be fighting for over there and what the plan is. Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penises were — but at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions. We’re the predators. Because we have an entire economy built on asking young people what they want, making the cheapest, sleaziest form of it they’ll accept, and selling it to them until they choke on it and die. You know who’s grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, by convincing you they’re depressed, hyperactive or suffering from attention-deficit disorder and so they must all get medicated. The drug dealers hooking your kids aren’t in South America, they’re in the halls of Congress handing out campaign donations to your congressmen. Mark Foley says he never slept with those kids, and I believe him, because American children are so hopped up on pills I doubt any of them could get it up. From 1995 to 2002, the number of children prescribed antipsychotic drugs increased by over 400 percent. Either our children are going insane — which we might look on as a problem — or, more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies. So stop already with the righteous moral indignation about predators — this whole country is trying to get inside your kid’s pants because that’s where he keeps the money Daddy gave him to stay out of his hair. I don’t care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penises because I have some sad news for you: Your kid is so larded out on Cheetos and Yoo-hoo, he can’t even see his penis. We live in a country where the ultimate consumer is an obese 16-year-old hooked up at one end to a Big Gulp and at the other to a PlayStation. So many of our kids today are fat drug addicts, it’s almost as if Rush Limbaugh had had puppies. In conclusion, we can pretend that the biggest threat to “our children” is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it’s Mom and Dad. When your son can’t find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying — including the one in which the Marine turns into Lancelot — then the person fucking him is you.
          • youtube
        
        
        • More and more American pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control because of their personal moral objections. Hey, you know what would really teach us a lesson? If you took off your pretend doctor jacket and got another job.
        
        Now, of course, I know what the other side is saying, yes, but this is a moral issue. Yeah, but the problem is, not everyone get their morals from the same book of fairy tales. You go by the book that says slavery is okay but sex is wrong until after marriage.
        A pharmacist is not a law-giver, not even a doctor. You don't answer to a law above the laws of men. You work for Sav-On. The doctors are the ones who make medical decisions because they went to medical school, whereas you were transferred from the counter where people drop off film.
        
        • The Democrats just never learn, Americans don't really care which side of an issue your on as long as you don't act like pussies. When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they could get things done even when their in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats, who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen.
        
        
        • Obama didn't say a word in defense of Van Jones and basically fired him because Glenn Beck told him to. Just like we dropped "end of life counseling" from health care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant death panels on her Facebook page.