Top 180 Al Franken Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I don’t know why dishonesty has always gotten under my skin. My parents taught me to tell the truth, but come on, whose parents didn’t? Well, okay, maybe Trump’s. The point is, I don’t know where exactly my particular obsession with lies and lying liars came from. And I admit, it’s a little weird. Part of it may be that I’ve always been an incredibly literal person.”

— Al Franken

152. “Some of my colleagues seem more interested in using every procedural method possible to keep the Senate from doing anything than they are in creating jobs or helping Americans struggling in a difficult economy.”

— Al Franken

153. “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.”

— Al Franken

154. “Also, like Bush, Bauer is open to a little good-natured ribbing. Even about his religion. According to Prophecy, at the moment of the Rapture everyone who has taken Christ as his savior will immediately ascend to heaven. So if you’re in an airplane, and your pilot has accepted Christ, you’re in trouble.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

156. “Campaign contributions don’t buy votes. What they buy is access.”

— Al Franken

157. “The crash of 2008 was driven in no small part by unfair practices in the mortgage industry, which led to many consumers becoming trapped in loans they didn’t understand and couldn’t afford.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

159. “I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.”

— Al Franken

160. “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.”

— Al Franken

161. “Changing technologies, changing marketplaces, and even changing trends in anti-competitive practices have all presented challenges to antitrust enforcement.”

— Al Franken

162. “That’s how things are supposed to work. If you are privileged enough to have a job as a lawmaker, part of your job is to make laws. And if you don’t like the way a law is working, your job is to help make it work better. But.”

— Al Franken

163. “I also discovered how much I could learn from listening to other people’s stories – even people who at first blush didn’t seem like the kind of people you could learn much of anything from.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

165. “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.”

— Al Franken

166. “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.”

— Al Franken

167. “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.”

— Al Franken

168. “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.”

— Al Franken

169. “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.”

— Al Franken

170. “Once you even acknowledge that there is a line, that there are things you shouldn’t be allowed to joke about, that there are words that can’t be said no matter the context, you’re selling out the very idea of comedy.”

— Al Franken

171. “Paul’s greatest contribution to the progressive cause wasn’t what he accomplished in the senate, although he accomplished a lot. It’s the way he inspired others to take action, and taught them to be effective, and gave them the confidence to stand up and shout about what they believed it.”

— Al Franken

172. “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.”

— Al Franken

173. “I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.”

— Al Franken

174. “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.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

176. “If we don’t start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it’s going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching reasonable political discourse.”

— Al Franken

177. “You’re not supposed to have to be rich or lucky to have a chance to do great things. Opportunity is supposed to be for everyone. And that’s why I’m a Democrat.”

— Al Franken

178. “Mitch McConnell’s innovation was in using it constantly to slow down things that did have bipartisan support, just to make sure as little as possible happened that Obama could get credit for. You.”

— Al Franken

179. “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.”

— Al Franken

180. “When you win an election, what you really win is a chance to go to work for working families who need a voice in Minnesota.”

— Al Franken

181. “The Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to corporations.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

183. “I’m from the Vietnam generation. I didn’t serve.”

— Al Franken

184. “Either way, senators certainly do a lot less drugs than we did at SNL.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

186. “I want to reclaim ‘liberal.’ I’m a liberal, and I think most Americans are liberals.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

188. “It was almost as if the incoming commander-in-chief had some sort of mental health problem. The kind of mental health problem that you would be disturbed to discover in your kid’s piano teacher, let alone the president of the United States of America.”

— Al Franken