Al franken quotes

I'm crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.

All concluded that Russia did in fact interfere in the 2016 election in order to, quote, help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton. And the agencies concluded that the Russians had a clear preference for President Trump.

Armed with nothing more than a Facebook user's phone number and home address, anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars can obtain personal information they should never have access to, including a user's date of birth, e-mail address, or estimated income.

It's not preppies, cause I'm a preppie myself. I just don't like homosexuals. If you ask me, they're all homosexuals in the Pudding. Hey, I was glad when that Pudding homosexual got killed in Philadelphia.

There's plenty of room for humor in politics, God knows, but it's a serious business.

Asking the question whether the mainstream media has a liberal or conservative bias is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it's a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us. And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.

If you use Facebook - as I do - Facebook in all likelihood has a unique digital file of your face, one that can be as accurate as a fingerprint and that can be used to identify you in a photo of a large crowd.

The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.

Progressives, in a way, are the new conservatives. We want to conserve what we fought to build.

And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it.

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

I once asked the most fabulous couple I know, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, how they kept things fresh despite having been married for almost seven months. 'It's a job, Al,' Guy told me. 'We work at it every day.'

I do personal attacks only on people who specialize in personal attacks.

There's no comparison between NPR and the propaganda that you hear from Rush or from Sean Hannity, the news movement conservatives that are just laying out, slathering out the disinformation and the lies, as I discuss in my book, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.'

I think that the default for collecting any kind of personal data should be opt-in consent.

Well, a lot of politics is communicating with people, and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I've been a producer and led people. Also, being a comedian, you're under pressure.

I know I have an awful lot to learn from the people of Minnesota.

Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks.

Bob Dole used to be really funny. Barney Frank can be kind of funny. Bob Kerrey has a good sense of humor.

Net neutrality has been in place since the very beginning of the Internet.

I'm from the Vietnam generation. I didn't serve.

We need to be pro-science; we have to go back to science.

During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.

It's the Power of the Almighty, the Splendor of Nature, and then you.

I am a Minnesotan, and not just because I root for the Vikings and the Twins. I like the Minnesota-nice sensibility. I like the liberal tradition; I like the Hubert Humphrey tradition fighting for civil rights.

There is a subset of Democrats who tend to mis-fill out ballots. The way you mark the ballot is like an S.A.T. - you fill in the circle. And the subset of people who tend to, like, put a check there instead, or an X, or fill it out wrong, tend to be people who didn't take S.A.T.s, or first-time voters, or people with English as a second language.

When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.

If you control the flow of information, you can control the conversation around important issues. If you can control the conversation, you can change this country.

Changing technologies, changing marketplaces, and even changing trends in anti-competitive practices have all presented challenges to antitrust enforcement.

For 35 years I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren’t funny. Some of them weren’t appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.

I'm the New York Jew who actually grew up in Minnesota.

I don’t know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can’t see it.

We need an investigation, because we don't know what Donald Trump owes Russia. We don't know how many Russian oligarchs have invested in his business.

We know that the Russian's interfered in our election and they did it to benefit President Trump. The intelligence agencies confirmed that.

If we have George W. Bush as president, we're going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.

As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.

Liberals like me love America. We just love America in a different way.

I'm a bit of a shill for the Clinton Administration, which has its perks. I'm invited to all the inaugural balls.

Well, I think that there's a value to comedy in and of itself.

My dad was a terrible businessman.

I believe people have a right to know what's going on with their information and how it's collected, how it's stored and who gets it.

Comedy to the Senate? Well, there certainly hasn't been a satirist or a political satirist who's done that. So, that really was uncharted territory during the campaign. But I think it's a good thing. Some people thought that it was an odd career arc, but to me it made absolute sense.

Call-time has renewed my faith in the need for public financing of elections. Call-time is where I as the candidate, sit in a room with my “call-time manager,” and a phone. Then I call people and ask them for money. For hours. Apparently, I’m really good at it.

The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I've had to learn a little bit about it. It's not rocket science: You get ratings, that's good.

Teen pregnancy went way down in the '90s, and 75 percent of it was because of increased use of contraception.

My spiritual life is... sometimes I have access to it and sometimes I don't. When I do have access to it, it's usually a sense of my understanding what the best course of action or the best thing for me to do. By best, I mean when I have a real sense of doing the right thing and doing good for people and the connected universe of everybody.

Minnesotans know the difference between the job of satirist and the job of senator. And so do I.

If you look at terrorists, they really have no sense of humor.

When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online.

Apple has long been a leading innovator of mobile technology; I myself own an iPhone.

I think if you're going to do a movie about Reagan, you do it about the fact that he created the huge deficit, that he armed the Mujahideen, that he armed Saddam, that he armed Iran, that he armed two-thirds of the Axis of Evil, and that he funded terrorists in Central America. He was, in my mind, a terrible president.

I also focus on Bush and his administration - who do a lot of lying - and how a right-wing media has allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff that, in a different media environment, they probably wouldn't be able to get away with.

The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations.

My parents were really political. The news was very important in our home. We basically had dinner every night while watching the news, and then we'd discuss it with our parents.

National security laws must protect national security. But they must also protect the public trust and preserve the ability of an informed electorate to hold its government to account.

During the Reagan Administration, Bob Dole was present at a ceremony that included each living ex-president. Looking at a tableau of Ford, Carter and Nixon, Dole said, 'There they are: Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Evil.'

If I put myself on the ballot and even 50 people voted for me, it'd be a travesty.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

It is my fondest wish that in the fullness of time, the American people will look back on the Franken presidency as something of a mixed bag and not as a complete disaster.

The crash of 2008 was driven in no small part by unfair practices in the mortgage industry which led to many consumers being trapped in loans they didn't understand and couldn't afford.

We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.

I've spent my entire career being a satirist.

If you use a cell phone - as I do - your wireless carrier likely has records about your physical movements going back months, if not years.

When you live in New York, one of two things happen - you either become a New Yorker, or you feel more like the place you came from.

The Republican agenda is a radical vision in which Medicaid is slashed to the bone - in which we start to balance the budget on the backs of, literally, our most vulnerable citizens.

I think the government has a role in protecting the fundamental rights of its citizens.

What you see on the campaign trail is me. It's easy being me.

Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and the changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a “living” document.

Let's keep the Internet weird. Let's keep the Internet free.

He [Newt Gingrich] is the most unpopular politician in America. His favorable rating is only four points higher than the Unabomber.

Antitrust law isn't about protecting competing businesses from each other, it's about protecting competition itself on behalf of the public.

As someone who's spent time with our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on USO tours and met wounded warriors at Walter Reed and Bethesda, I feel a deep obligation to the men and women who have risked life and limb on our behalf.

I want to reclaim 'liberal.' I'm a liberal, and I think most Americans are liberals.

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

I wish I had spent more time at the office and less time in prison.

Terrorism, to me, is the use of terror for political purpose, and terror is indiscriminate murder of civilians to make a political point.

You have to love your country like an adult loves somebody, not like a child loves its Mommy. And right-wing Republicans tend to love America like a child loves its Mommy, where everything Mommy does is okay. But adult love means you’re not in denial, and you want the loved one to be the best they can be.

But in the right-wing media, they do have a right-wing bias. And they also have an agenda. So their agenda is: we're an adjunct of the Republican Party, and we're going push that agenda every day, and, as you say, brand these stories that help further the right-wing cause.

Service dogs raise their masters' sense of well-being.

I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.

There are as many forms of advice as there are colors of the rainbow. Remember that good advice can come from bad people and bad advice from good people. The important thing about advice is that it is simply that. Advice.

Veterans report that service dogs help break their isolation. People will often avert their eyes when they see a wounded veteran. But when the veteran has a dog, the same people will come up and say, 'Hi' to pet the dog and then strike up a conversation.

Google might be doping the horses.

Today I will masterbate! Okay, that was a mistake. I should have written "Today I will masterbate--if I want to!

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me.

There's an appeal to the American sense of exceptionalism, that we're morally superior, as way to not be self-critical. I think that's a bit dangerous.

We need to start by having a conversation about climate change. It would be irresponsible to avoid the issue just because it's uncomfortable to talk about.

It's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.

Whining is anger through a small opening.

I hope you realize, in a democracy, laughter is assent.

I do have a self-censor; everybody does, or at least most who are not pathological do.

I'm sure I've devoted enough thought to Rush Limbaugh for one lifetime.

You know, Lincoln was funny. I don't think F.D.R. was very funny. But Lincoln was funny. Lincoln was really funny. But I think you should get elected first, and then show that you're funny.

Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world.

Too many people don't protect their smartphones with a password or PIN. I anticipate that Apple's fingerprint reader will in fact make iPhone 5S owners more likely to secure their smartphones.

My dad loved comedians, especially George Jessel, and he loved Henny Youngman and Buddy Hackett.

No one is more sensitive to the issue of overeating than the creator of Stuart Smalley.

The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers - one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times - both in war, and in peace.

The right wing has had a radio apparatus for years and years, so they've had minor leagues - they've had local rightwing guys who've become national rightwing guys, and who build slowly, and that's how it goes. We haven't had that. It isn't like we have a farm team.

Minnesota has a proud tradition of having two Senators on the Ag committee - a tradition I'd like very much to continue.

I just can't sit still and meditate; that doesn't kind of work for me. I don't even know exactly what it means.

The institutions that we've built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don't apply to the private sector. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to Silicon Valley. And you can't impeach Google if it breaks its 'Don't be evil' campaign pledge.

Let's not let the government sell us out. Let's fight for net neutrality.

Humor and seriousness are not in opposition to each other.

Why don't we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children, and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.

When you win an election, what you really win is a chance to go to work for working families who need a voice in Minnesota.

When a company is able to establish a dominant market position, consumers lose meaningful choices. You might not like that Facebook shares your political opinions with Politico, but are you really going to delete all the photos, all the posts, all the connections - the presence you’ve spent years establishing on the world’s dominant social network?

Most of us here in the media are what I call infotainers...Rush Limbaugh is what I call a disinfotainer. He entertains by spreading disinformation.

Anybody who deliberately propagandizes with lies should be held up to scorn and ridicule.

I'm a perfectionist and if I start making changes, I'll never stop.

We owe an historic debt to American Indians. They have a unique set of concerns that haven’t been addressed and I’d like to stand with them. Also, I’d like to get their views on immigration.

Google's screen for privacy settings does give you more options for what you share than Apple's does. But it's not a complete list, and people aren't aware of whether or not that information will go to a third party.

The nature of the Internet and the importance of net neutrality is that innovation can come from everyone.

In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.

In my first week as a U.S. senator, I had the privilege of participating in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

There is - I mean - I found early in life that righteous indignation is a little off-putting, and so I try to couch it with humor.

If someone hacks your password, you can change it - as many times as you want. You can’t change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret.

I'm for Israel's right to exist.

My views about God come from my dad. Dad told me that he believed Nature, which to him included humankind, to be so beautiful, so magnificent, that there had to be something behind it all.

I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a chance for me to do anything I wanted.

Yeah, but you need an experienced radio veteran who is a liberal advocate. And there just hadn't been any radio that did that. And so they weren't trained - they had developed all these bad habits of being objective and balanced and stuff like that.

I think Hell exists on Earth. It's a psychological state, or it can be a physical state. People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell. I think there are all kinds of different hells. It's not a place you go to after you die.

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.

Net neutrality isn't a government takeover of the Internet, as many of my Republican colleagues have alleged.

When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant our nation.