“The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness – and the other represents oppression.”

I’m as poor as a church mouse, that’s just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.

I’m not looking for anything other than an interesting role to play.

The job is interesting, and the task is difficult, but the man is just a decent man doing a very ordinary job.

I’m not a collector. I don’t like the toy cupboard syndrome that causes so many good cars to evaporate.

I consider myself more of a visual comedian than a physical one.

I like to juggle with one ball at a time. Then I put the ball down and do nothing for extended periods of time.

Mr. Bean is essentially a child trapped in the body of a man. All cultures identify with children in a similar way, so he has this bizarre global outreach.

I have always worried about things more than I should.

In TV, and in particular in commercials, you don’t really need to explain very much at all.

A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

Funny things tend not to happen to me. I am not a natural comic. I need to think about things a lot before I can be even remotely amusing.

I have always regarded Mr. Bean as a timeless, ageless character, and I would rather he be remembered as a character mostly in his 30s and 40s.

My personal problem is that I take the business of film-making so seriously that I find it very difficult to relax.

The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.

When I was doing Bean more than I’ve done him in the last few years, I did strange things – like appearing on chat shows in character as Mr. Bean.

I’m more critical of the films I make than anyone else.

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society.

Real liberty exists only there where exploitation has been annihilated, where no oppression of some peoples by others exists, where there is no unemployment and pauperism, where a person does not tremble because tomorrow he may lose his job, home and bread.

If you let a bully come in and chase you out of your front yard, he’ll be on your porch and the next day he’ll rape your wife in your own bed.

The Jews are not a nation!

I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn’t a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament.