Top 180 Al Franken Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I’ve spent my entire career being a satirist.”

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Al Franken

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Al Franken

174. “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

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

— Al Franken

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

— Al Franken

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Al Franken

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

— 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