Top 180 Al Franken Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.”

— Al Franken

102. “We need to be pro-science; we have to go back to science.”

— Al Franken

103. “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.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

106. “If you hear, day after day, liberals are rooting against armed forces, that is eventually going to have an effect on soldiers and troops who are actually going to believe that and it’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”

— Al Franken

107. “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.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

109. “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.”

— Al Franken

110. “The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I’ve had to learn a little bit about it. It’s not rocket science: You get ratings, that’s good.”

— Al Franken

111. “Net neutrality has been in place since the very beginning of the Internet.”

— Al Franken

112. “But now we seem to have entered an era where getting caught lying openly and shamelessly, lying in a manner that insults the intelligence of both your friends and foes, lying about lying, and lying for the sake of lying have all lost their power to damage a politician. In fact, the “Trump Effect” yields the opposite result: Trump supporters seem to approve of the fact that he lies constantly, including to them.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

114. “If Republicans eliminate Medicare, America will become a country in which you can never retire – and once you physically can no longer work, you are desperately poor until you die.”

— Al Franken

115. “My parents were really political. The news was very important in our home. We basically had dinner every night while watching the news, and then we’d discuss it with our parents.”

— Al Franken

116. “There is – I mean – I found early in life that righteous indignation is a little off-putting, and so I try to couch it with humor.”

— Al Franken

117. “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.”

— Al Franken

118. “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.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

120. “So I’ve always been interested in politics. And I thank my parents for that. As you can see, there’s a strong element of moral indignation behind this interest, and indignation is well and good in doses, but I noticed fairly early in life that some people live to find stuff to be indignant about. And it’s pretty unattractive. That’s why I decided to become a wiseass.”

— Al Franken

121. “If I put myself on the ballot and even 50 people voted for me, it’d be a travesty.”

— Al Franken

122. “At ‘SNL,’ I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in ’95, I could let my own beliefs out.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

124. “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.”

— Al Franken

125. “As the polls began closing in the East, with states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia going for Barack Obama, it was quickly becoming clear that this would be an especially bad night for racists all across the country.”

— Al Franken

126. “Mike Mansfield had a saying: “It only takes one senator to make a scene. But it takes more than one to make a difference.” Okay, he never said that. I made it up.”

— Al Franken

127. “If 98 out of 100 doctors tell me I’ve got a problem, I should take their advice. And if those two other doctors get paid by Big Snack Food, like certain climate deniers get paid by Big Coal, I shouldn’t take their advice.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

129. “The people of Minnesota value a politician who believes what he says and says what he believes and votes that way.”

— Al Franken

130. “Sometimes if I tell people, ‘I’m afraid that I’m really a fraud,’ or ‘I have a lot of self-doubt,’ they go, ‘Oh, no, you’re kidding.’ I go, ‘No, I’m really honest.’”

— Al Franken

131. “Some readers might think that because I am so successful, I have never made a mistake.”

— Al Franken

132. “I want a president who can handle a cream soda.”

— Al Franken

133. “Armed with nothing more than a Facebook user’s phone number and home address, anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars can obtain personal information they should never have access to, including a user’s date of birth, e-mail address, or estimated income.”

— Al Franken

134. “My point is, the Senate is filled not just with lawyers, but with old white men. Chapter 28 The Angel and the Devil Actors often claim not to read their own reviews.”

— Al Franken

135. “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.”

— Al Franken

136. “Virtually everyone in the world believes that climate change is real and is caused by human beings, except Republicans in the United States. Especially the people who would know best: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by human activity, and I suspect the other 3 percent are being paid by the fossil fuel industry”.”

— Al Franken

137. “Yes, Roger Ailes, who actually was very funny and who, as far as I know, did not sexually harass anyone during the two hours he was with us. Between.”

— Al Franken

138. “Progressives, in a way, are the new conservatives. We want to conserve what we fought to build.”

— Al Franken

139. “One thing I’ve noticed about politics is that these guys have pretty thick hides.”

— Al Franken

140. “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.”

— Al Franken

141. “If we have George W. Bush as president, we’re going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.”

— Al Franken

142. “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.”

— Al Franken

143. “I’m for Israel’s right to exist.”

— Al Franken

144. “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.”

— Al Franken

145. “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.”

— Al Franken

146. “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.”

— Al Franken

147. “I’ve spent my entire career being a satirist.”

— Al Franken

148. “I compensated for this by absorbing as much.”

— Al Franken

149. “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.’”

— Al Franken

150. “Net neutrality isn’t a government takeover of the Internet, as many of my Republican colleagues have alleged.”

— Al Franken