John Oliver

The death penalty is like the McRib. When you can’t have it, it seems so tantalizing. But when they bring it back, you think, ‘Wow, this is ethically wrong’.

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.

Payday loans are like the Lay’s Potato Chips of finance. You can’t have just one and they’re terrible for you.

It’s the 2016 election, and it’s 2015 right now. So I don’t care until we’re in the same year as the thing that I’m supposed to care about.

In the last series, we set up a church [to expose televangelists and the ease of avoiding tax through establishing a religious organisation]. It took a lot of legal advice and months of gathering correspondence with one pastor. In terms of the UK, I’m not sure what the Inland Revenue’s position on churches is. The IRS is very much of the opinion that all churches, whatever their form, operate tax free. How would I make sense of what we achieved? We achieved nothing! We achieved $70,000 in single [donations], a four-foot wooden penis and five vials of human sperm. Although a lot of people would consider that a decent year’s work, I suppose. It’s a pretty impressive room full of tat.

Honestly, the main takeaway from these two weeks is that, incredibly, we may be on the brink of electing such a damaged, sociopathic narcissist, that the simple presidential duty of comforting the families of fallen soldiers may actually be beyond his capabilities – and I genuinely did not think that was a part of the job that someone could be bad at.

I don’t know what it feels like not to have a great family support system – I was lucky to have that.

I only mentioned people in Barbie Dreams that I f**k wit. This isn’t a diss. Yikes. This is culture, this is BIGGIE!!!!! New York!!!! This is FUN. Light hearted fun.

This is my idea of heaven, coming home and watching the news.

Here in L.A. the standard of beauty is kind of ridiculous. I want to be doing this when I’m in my fifties and sixties and this isn’t what I’m going to look like.

I don’t know how you explain Piers Morgan back to Americans now. I don’t think he ever intended for America to be his home, and there’s a difference between criticising the place you have come to call home and the place you have come to live in for a bit. Ideally, on the Venn diagram between myself and Piers there would be no overlap whatsoever, on either a personal or professional level. If we could be two non-interlocking circles I’d be fine with that. Any comparison with him makes me want to challenge you to a duel.

I think for women especially, you need to have a plan. I need to have some other ways to generate income, so I don’t have to stretch my face or lift the top of my head with surgery or something.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

When in trouble, take a bath and wash your hair.

A song is a song, you know? First of all comes a song, second of all comes the way it’s promoted … where you place it and what happens to it and how it gets streamed and all that sort of thing is in the lap of the gods, and maybe artists in the end just take a back seat and let it roll.

There is no doubt about precisely when folks began racing each other in automobiles. It was the day they built the second automobile.

Love should be an inspiration, not an obligation.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

When I was going to school in, like, ’84 to ’88, you didn’t have cell phones. There was no e-mail, if you can wrap your brain around that.

[on acting] I just enjoyed it as soon as I started doing it. It fulfilled something in me, and I’m so lucky that I found it.

Welcome to the MTV Movie Awards I am a bit surprised they asked me to host… and so was MTV. They thought I was Adele.