“Folks, it’s time to evolve. That’s why we’re troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything’s failing? It’s because, um – they’re no longer relevant. We’re supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?”

So, it’s good to be here, wherever I am.

Jesus-murdered. Martin Luther King-murdered. Gandhi-murdered. Malcolm X-murdered. Reagan-wounded.

I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.

[Comedy] is an escape from illusions. The audience is…thinking, ‘This bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense.’

You are the imagination of yourself.

You’re not a human till you’re in my phone book. There. My hat is now in the political ring.

How come people always flip and think they’re Jesus? Why not Buddha? Particularly in America, where more people resemble Buddha than Jesus. ‘Ah’m BUDDHA!’ ‘You’re Bubba!’ ‘Ah’m Buddha now..All I gotta do is change 3 letters on ma belt.

I don’t know what you all believe, and I don’t really care … but you have to admit that beliefs are odd. Lots of Christians wear crosses around their necks … you really think when Jesus comes back, he ever wants to see a fucking cross?

No, I don’t do drugs anymore, either. But I’ll tell you something about drugs. I used to do drugs, but I’ll tell you something honestly about drugs, honestly, and I know it’s not a very popular idea, you don’t hear it very often anymore, but it is the truth,

When two or more people agree on an issue, I form on the other side.

People always snap and think they’re Jesus. How come no one ever snaps and thinks they’re Buddha?

Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Go back to bed America… you are free to do as we tell you… you are free to do as we tell you.

I love talking about the Kennedy assasination. The reason I do is because I’m fascinated by it. I’m fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it. I think that’s interesting in what is ostensibly a democracy.

Mushrooms grow on cow turds. I love that. I think that’s why you giggle the first hour.

A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.

People in the U.K. share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn’t share with itself. They have a sense of irony, which America doesn’t have, seeing as it’s being run by fundamentalists who take things literally.

The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.

An it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires – though a lot of churches are that, too.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Not Churchill. Sixty-five, old for a Churchill.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.