Top 40 Greg Giraldo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I like when people give up chocolate for Lent. Ooh, just like being nailed to a cross.”

— Greg Giraldo

2. “Sometimes you have to suffer a little bit in your youth to motivate yourself to succeed in later life. If Bill Gates had got laid in high school, do you think there’d be a Microsoft?”

— Greg Giraldo

3. “A good joke provides tension, and then, release of that tension. You build the tension by saying things that are controversial. The release is the laugh. The bigger the surprise or insight in your joke, the bigger the laugh.”

— Greg Giraldo

4. “In catholisism we have an entire religion based on a woman who really stuck to her story.”

— Greg Giraldo

5. “Gilbert Gottfried is famously cheap. I’m impressed you’re here Gilbert. You gotta buy new clothes and take a week off work just to do this. But you showed up. You tightened your belt and you came. You’re like David Carradine.”

— Greg Giraldo

6. “Look at the insane things the Jews believe. The Jews believe that Barbra Streisand is worth $1,000 bucks a ticket.”

— Greg Giraldo

7. “When I heard you could get a disease from playing with your prairie dog, I thought, ‘Wow, what a euphemism.’ I thought playing with my prairie dog was the best way to avoid diseases.”

— Greg Giraldo

8. “Seventy-two virgins – does that make sense to anyone? And it’s an ancient religion, maybe it was misinterpreted? Maybe it’s not 72 virgins, maybe it’s a 7-foot-2 Persian.”

— Greg Giraldo

9. “People always want to compare their dogs to having kids. That’s insulting. First of all, nobody has a dog because they were too drunk to pull out.”

— Greg Giraldo

10. “There hasn’t been a more effeminate Jew in the closet since Anne Frank.”

— Greg Giraldo

11. “George Bush says that gay people getting married would violate the sanctity of marriage. Is anybody here married? Does it feel like a gift from God to you?”

— Greg Giraldo

12. “Terrorism is obviously on everybody’s mind. The other day my son says to me, ‘Daddy, how come the bad men hate us?’ How sad is that? I actually got tears in my eyes – because he’s 18. What kind of a moron am I raising?”

— Greg Giraldo

13. “You try not to have a favorite when you have sons or kids. Can’t have a favorite. Can’t let them know know if you do. I don’t. I treat my main son and the other two exactly the same way.”

— Greg Giraldo

14. “Norm MacDonald is here – one of the funniest people ever. Norm’s got a giant gambling problem. He’s dropped more coin in a casino than Michael J. Fox at a parking meter.”

— Greg Giraldo

15. “Ice-T is so old that the first thing he bought with the money from his album sales was his freedom.”

— Greg Giraldo

16. “On a day-to-day basis, you get tired of waiting to be accepted. In show business, someone else has to say that you’re good or that you’re worth going to see or worth taping a show. There’s a lot of pain here. There’s a lot of pain inside. I’m a sad, crying-on-the-inside kind of clown.”

— Greg Giraldo

17. “How many of you text message? It’s a great way of not communicating.”

— Greg Giraldo

18. “If you spend five minutes with me or watch me try to balance my checkbook, you can only imagine the disaster I would make of anyone’s legal issues.”

— Greg Giraldo

19. “Look at Thomas Jefferson. The guy had illegitimate kids in the 1700s, and they caught him last year. If you cheat on your wife and cover it up for 200 years, you’re pretty much thinking you’re home free.”

— Greg Giraldo

20. “My advice to graduates is to stay positive. Life is short, and you’ll be dead soon.”

— Greg Giraldo

21. “Some people say Larry the Cable Guy’s only successful because he’s pandering to the lowest common denominator, blatantly and not ironically exploiting people’s racist and homophobic tendencies. Don’t listen to these people, Larry. They’re just bitter and jealous and right.”

— Greg Giraldo

22. “People come to this country from all over the world to pursue their dreams of driving a taxi or selling hot dogs or working in a sweatshop.”

— Greg Giraldo

23. “We need more money for schools. We need more money for the kids. Ever think maybe the damn kids aren’t worth it?”

— Greg Giraldo

24. “A dangerous fire retardant chemical is being found in women’s breast milk. My wife’s breastfeeding, but you know, you gotta be an optimist. I’m like, well, maybe it’s making my child fireproof.”

— Greg Giraldo

25. “Do you know how short you have to be to have a Napoleon complex in North Korea?”

— Greg Giraldo

26. “The reality is I’m not a ‘get knocked down and come back harder’ kind of guy.”

— Greg Giraldo

27. “Little did I know that earning a living at stand-up is the hardest thing you can do. But once I started doing it, I just loved it, and I realized that I was actually kinda good at it, and then that was it.”

— Greg Giraldo

28. “The things that make me laugh are considered smart or whatever, I guess. But stuff that’s self-consciously intelligent or self-consciously hip or cool, that doesn’t do it for me either. You just try to be funny.”

— Greg Giraldo

29. “We’re a spoiled, lazy culture, full of ethnic pride that has to have a parade for every nationality.”

— Greg Giraldo

30. “Joke stealing is a big deal to me, but I mean, I’m not going to investigate it if it doesn’t effect me directly.”

— Greg Giraldo

31. “You think they could stop putting these experts on the news with their doomsday scenarios of how the terrorists might attack us? Because you get the sense they’re coming up with ideas that these people haven’t thought of themselves.”

— Greg Giraldo

32. “If being a gangster were a prerequisite to being a musician, there’d be a lot less cello music, for example.”

— Greg Giraldo

33. “All the evidence we need that God is angry with us is Justin Timberlake’s career.”

— Greg Giraldo

34. “It’s hard to distinguish when I was actually struggling from when I only felt like I was struggling – which was pretty much always.”

— Greg Giraldo

35. “Some people are just really goofy kind of guitar acts, and they go out and do these colleges and start making a fortune pretty early on. And other people – I know guys who are great comics, who’ve done the Letterman show many times, who still barely pay their bills.”

— Greg Giraldo

36. “Why do we need another station where everyone has a gun? We already have BET.”

— Greg Giraldo

37. “The hardest part, for real, is probably when you just don’t feel like going on stage and being funny.”

— Greg Giraldo

38. “If you’re going to dedicate your career to ranting about the excesses of American capitalism, you probably shouldn’t weigh 450 pounds.”

— Greg Giraldo

39. “If I drive my SUV I’m supporting terrorism. Okay, I’ll take a taxi, Is that better?”

— Greg Giraldo

40. “Even before the kids are born, you’ve go to make these decisions. If it’s a boy, do we get him circumcised? If it’s a girl, do we keep her?”

— Greg Giraldo

41. “Americans are not gonna conserve. We’re not gonna shift to smaller cars. We can’t – we have big, fat kids.”

— Greg Giraldo

42. “Christine Todd Whitman had to resign as the head of the EPA. You know, when the governor of New Jersey decides the environment is hopeless, you gotta really think that one through.”

— Greg Giraldo

43. “You got a cop under five feet tall, what if he’s gotta plant evidence on a high shelf? What then? What if he’s gotta chase a suspect onto a ride at Disneyland?”

— Greg Giraldo

44. “It’s something like 70% of American adults are obese, and the rest of them are women on Ally McBeal.”

— Greg Giraldo

45. “There are more whipped guys on television than there were on the Amistad.”

— Greg Giraldo

46. “Jesse has opened for me extensively on the road so I’ve seen him do hundreds of sets. He is always super funny, has tons of material and the crowds love him. Bottom line, Jesse Joyce is a great comedian.”

— Greg Giraldo

47. “The reality is I’m not this person with this driving ‘get it done’ attitude.”

— Greg Giraldo

48. “The only reason we’re not in Iran now is because we’re going alphabetically and George Bush can’t spell.”

— Greg Giraldo

49. “I’ve always had real trouble knowing what my actual desires and goals are. I’ve just been dragged along by fate.”

— Greg Giraldo