Al Franken Quotes

We need to prepare our kids for a 21st Century economy, and we’re not doing it with our schools.

Gary Bauer is a very good – he’s a good friend of mine.

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.

The Medicare Part D prescription drug bill, which might be the most corrupt piece of legislation in history, was a huge giveaway of taxpayer funds to the big pharmaceutical companies.

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

I ask the American people not to fall victim to disinformation. There are no death panels. The Affordable Care Act cuts the deficit.

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

To make the argument that the media has a left- or right-wing, or a liberal or a conservative bias, is like asking if the problem with Al-Qaeda is do they use too much oil in their hummus.

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.

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.

Some of George W. Bush‘s friends say that Bush believes God called him to be president during these times of trial. But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. ‘That worked for everyone else,’ God said.

I’m part of the mushball middle. I consider ‘confused‘ the majority position because, thankfully, most people would rather be uncertain some of the time than 100% positive all the time – even when they’re wrong.

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

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

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.

Ralph Nader is a hero. I know Ralph, and I call him up occasionally. He’s helped me out on a couple of occasions when I’ve given speeches to corporations where he’d have a good… He’d give me some good information.

Technology is an incredible tool – it connects people to each other, creates jobs all over the world, and makes life easier for millions of Americans.

Demagoguery sells. And therefore radio stations will put it on. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do something else and also make it sell. You know, when I look at an Ann Coulter or I look at a Rush or I look at a Sean Hannity, I think to myself, ‘What kind of self-image do you have?’

When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both.

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.

Humor and seriousness are not in opposition to each other.

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

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?

I don’t know what happens to you after you die. I’m not banking on there being, like, a heaven.

I’m for Israel‘s right to exist.

The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it – politics – was important… that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.

My parents didn’t make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate – he didn’t have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.

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.

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.

My dad was a terrible businessman.

I listen to NPR when I listen to the radio, but I don’t listen to the radio that much. You know, I listen to Garrison Keillor, I listen to ‘Prairie Home Companion.’

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

Part of the middle class promise is that, after a lifetime of hard work, you’ll be able to retire and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Medicare was established to secure that promise.

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

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

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important ’cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.

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.

I think Clinton fatigue was a real thing. It’s just hard to get comfortable with Gore – it was hard for him to project who he is, the person people know in private.

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.

I couldn’t think of anything less appealing than molding the minds of tomorrow‘s leaders.

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

I don’t think I’m an angry person. I think I’m a person who’s angry. I’m angry at the Bush administration; I’m angry at the right wing media. And by that I don’t mean the media is right wing. I mean, there is a part of the media that’s not the mainstream media. That’s Fox, that is ‘The Wall Street Journal‘ editorial page.

It’s hard to have that debate around secret programs authorized by secret legal opinions issued by a secret court. Actually, it’s impossible to have that debate.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are, with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values.

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to corporations.

To ask whether the mainstream media has a conservative or liberal bias is like asking whether al-Qaida uses too much oil in their hummus. It’s – I think they might use too much oil in their hummus – but it’s the wrong question.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I grew up in Minnesota, where we treasure our tradition of civic engagement – and our record of having the nation‘s highest voter participation.

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

My dad didn’t graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time.

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

Having an actual income can expand your romantic horizons toward the more appealing end of the spectrum.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.’

The Minnesotans I talk to are really concerned about what the future holds for their families. They’re trying to pay for health care and send their kids to college, they’re worried about declining home values, they’re scared for a loved one they have serving in Iraq.

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.

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

My daughter became a teacher right out of college.

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

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

The next thing I am doing is moving back home to Minnesota and getting involved in politics. I’m looking at a run for Senate in 2008, but in the meantime I am focused on knitting together the progressive network in the upper Midwest.

I’ve spent my entire career being a satirist.

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’m crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.

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.

If you want a free email service that doesn’t use your words to target ads to you, you’ll have to figure out how to port years and years of Gmail messages somewhere else, which is about as easy as developing your own free email service.

Most Americans don’t think about antitrust law when they look at their cable bill, flip channels on TV, or worry about what their favorite website knows about them. But they should.

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.

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.

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.

I believe in not attacking a country pre-emptively unless you’re sure of what you’re doing and you’re working with allies.

If someone hacks your password, you can change it – as many times as you want.

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 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.

I think the Internet has developed at this incredibly rapid pace because of net neutrality, because of the free nature of it, because a YouTube can start the way YouTube started.

I know that it’s probably not a good idea for a comedian, especially a satirist, to support a public policy group or a politician. This is something I learned only too well years ago when I did a fundraiser for Pol Pot. A few years later I saw ‘The Killing Fields,’ and I’ve got to tell you, I just felt like a schmuck.

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.

The way I see it, I’m not going to Washington to be the 60th Democratic senator. I’m going to Washington to be the second senator from the state 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.

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.

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.