People say, ‘Are you afraid? Are you scared for your life?’ and I tell them: If I choose today to tone it down, if I choose today to shut up, tomorrow me, you, and all of us will be forced to.
BASSEM YOUSSEFSatire has its limits. It is really up to the people to make the change. The satirist’s role ends at the screen.
More Bassem Youssef Quotes
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This transcends any kind of religion and any kind of belief. This is actually an offense and attack on human values. He’s just saying out there I will shoot people in the face and people wouldn’t care.
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Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.
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I always tell people that a revolution is not an event, it’s a process. It is a struggle. And it doesn’t usually go smoothly.
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I was accused of insulting the president, insulting Islam, insulting – spreading rumors, disturbing the peace.
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There are people who believe in Egypt that I – I’m actually – I’m getting paid by external powers and external intelligence entities in order to use satire to bring down the government.
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Everybody grows up with comedy. I mean, Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing.
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I don’t care about Donald Trump himself. I care and I worry about the very big base that supports him because this kind of language would have been absolutely nonexistent maybe 15, 20.
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I think that the religious and the military right wings are just two sides of the same coin if somebody uses God and religion and somebody uses country and security.
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Make me a CIA agent to use sarcasm to bring down the government and bring down the country because this was all, of course, part of a worldwide conspiracy against the country.
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By the way, I follow the American elections, and I have never seen someone who is that offensive. I have seen people who are stupid. But stupid and offensive, that’s new.
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People went out there and they wrote articles and went on television shows saying that I am an operative that the CIA who used Jon Stewart to recruit me. So Jon Stewart, who actually – a guy from America was used by the CIA in order to recruit me for the CIA and be.
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It is very difficult to imagine that you can actually get rid of a dictatorship that has been there for 60 years only in 18 days.
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I think by the time I left Egypt, there was about like 400 accusations against me in the drawer of the public persecutor office. It’s a way for them to exhaust you, to push you, to put you under pressure, to distract you.
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It doesn’t matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the – in Egypt. So we became very good in that.
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People would believe propagate, spread rumors or conspiracy theories in order to protect their own system of denial.
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