If somebody wants to shoot up and die in front of you, more power to them. The herd has a way of thinning itself out.

Now let me get this straight. [President George W. Bush] is anti-abortion, but pro-death penalty. I guess it's all in the timing, huh?

[on 77-year-old President Ronald Reagan] He has access to "the button". You know, my grandfather is 77 and we won't even let him use the remote.

[on his "rants"] It's therapy. It's the same stuff I used to say to my shrink. I have a great place to rant: my show. Most people don't. Watch that ranting in real life.

I believe everything I say in the show, but I don't walk around in my everyday life like some incensed [Grigory Rasputin]. If I did, do you know how alone I'd be in the world?

Everybody has to sell out at some point to make a living. I'm a family man. I sold out to make an M&M commercial. They offer incredible amounts of money, and I say, 'What can I do to sell one more piece of candy for you? Do you want me to hug the M&M?

Andy Warhol was an optimist. It's more like 2 1/2 minutes [of fame].

I don't have credibility, I'm a comedian. I'm not Ed Murrow [Edward R. Murrow] up on the roof in a London fog reporting on the blitz.

Thanks to the notion of dysfunction, every zipperhead in this country can tap himself with a Freudian wand and go from failed frog to misunderstood prince.

I used to be sceptic, but not anymore, because now I am positive that I'm getting screwed.

Parenting is the easiest job to get - you just have to screw up once and it's yours.

The only way we were going to get the French to go into Iraq was to tell them we thought there were truffles in there.

[on filmmaker Michael Moore during a 2003 episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992)] He's going to wake up every day for the rest of his life, and he's going to tell us how he hates everything about this country except his right to hate it. And then we say that we love it and he's going to tell us what naive sheep we are and that he's the true patriot because he hates it and he sees all the problems in it. Yeah, right, Mike. You know something, if my yawn got any bigger they'd have to assign it a hurricane name, okay? Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly, completely wrong.

These liberals are telling me that I should take it easy on the terrorists. They said that our founding fathers would have gone easier on them. They were, after all, for civil liberties. Let me ask you a question: Do you really think that our founding fathers would have put up with any of this shit? I mean, our founding fathers blew peoples' heads off because they put a tax on their morning beverage!

You like the Red Skelton painting? Buy the Red Skelton painting. You like Home Improvement (1991)? Tape it and go over it like the [Abraham Zapruder] film. It's your life; live it on your terms.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but a thousand wrongs make a writer.

America may be the best country in the world, but that's kind of like being the valedictorian of summer school.

When it comes down to it, we're really just a big ant farm with beepers.