John Oliver

At this point, we aren’t just flirting with disaster; we’re rounding third base and asking if disaster has any condoms.

[about political pundits suggesting Trump be given a chance to be president] Now, in the broadest sense, I get that impulse: hope for the best in the face of very long odds. It’s like we’re on a plane and we just found out our pilot is a wombat.

That’s right, it was a boy. And finally, we have a member of the royal family with an actual excuse for being a toothless, petulant, useless human being…That one could get me into trouble back home.

Healthcare is like a pair of gym shorts. Even if it covers nearly all it is supposed to, you’re still left with some problematic gaps and terrible things can happen.

British politics, when done well, can be very fun. John Oliver

D.C. went under federal control in 1801 and it wasn’t until the 1960s that D.C.’s then three quarters of a million citizens, mostly African American, were given even the most basic electoral rights … With that level of restriction the mayor of D.C. gets to run the city the way a school council president gets to run her high school.

How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?

Ladies gotta say no to their husbands at the movies. They gotta say: ‘No, we are watching back-to-back cancer movies. And then this movie about a cat.’

I don’t want to be somebody else.

I moved out at 18. I always studied classes and trained a lot, you know. I think nowadays is such a different time because there’s so many channels promoting the celebrity aspect of things.

People say you can’t please everyone all the time. I don’t believe that. I think you can. I’m not like, ‘Oh I’m Kanye West.’ I’m like, ‘Oh you don’t like it? Oh wow!’ To the point where I know you have to like it.

[on Syrian Refugee Crisis] We have a worldwide international catastrophe – talking about it is one thing, doing something about it is another.

I am extremely square and obedient in nature!

For my first show at ‘SNL’, I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn’t getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, ‘Okay, that happened, and I did not die.’ You’ve got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

(on his feuds with many of his fellow rappers) If they keep comin’ at me, I’ll just keep responding back until they don’t exist anymore. I got the time and energy to ruin what is left of their careers, if they want to do that.

Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I’m the only person who can’t understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they’re not that great. These are questions everyone has.

I work, and then whenever I have any other time, I’m with my daughter, and then I go to sleep. I think you basically have to abandon the dreams of having any other adult activities in your life. You have to go to sleep whenever your child goes to sleep. That’s basically how we’re doing it.

I think they called it ‘sucking up’ to begin with. They finally had to come up with another name.

My most favorite joke is that to keep a marriage, the husband should have a night out with the boys and the wife should have a night out with the boys, too.

When you’re thirty-five, you can’t take as much booze … and I always got a little violent on drink…So it was kind of self-destructive suicide side of me, which is resolving itself for the better, I believe, because I never enjoyed it…

Everybody has forgotten about showmanship. People don’t look like rock stars any more. They just look like regular dudes off the street.