Top 40 Keith Olbermann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you’re not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don’t take it personally when they say ‘no’ – they may not be smart enough to say ‘yes.’”

— Keith Olbermann

2. “Success is overrated.”

— Keith Olbermann

3. “I’m not an anarchist. I believe in government.”

— Keith Olbermann

4. “An uprising of the reasonable is our only chance.”

— Keith Olbermann

5. “If you make a decision in your life, even one as eminently logical and self-improving as “Why’d you start washing your hair every day?” and you start getting questioned hourly about it, you’re going to start second-guessing yourself.”

— Keith Olbermann

6. “I do know without fear of contradiction what the definition of life is and it is 12 words long. ‘Life is defined by how much you improve the lives of others.’”

— Keith Olbermann

7. “Your anger will cool into hardened passionate insight if you wait a day. Most of the things that make me angry I let them sit. The heat that remains will be sufficient. The stuff that evaporates is the stuff that would have simply offended or made it histrionic.”

— Keith Olbermann

8. “You risk becoming a parody of yourself by not innovating.”

— Keith Olbermann

9. “The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.”

— Keith Olbermann

10. “I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics.”

— Keith Olbermann

11. “A bully is fighting out of a need to dominate. And is usually unwilling to take the consequences.”

— Keith Olbermann

12. “Health care is, at its core, about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death. Of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us unto eternity, extending it another year or month or second.”

— Keith Olbermann

13. “I just think if you’re 44 years old and you’re not smarter than you were when you were 35 years old or 25 years old, just stay in your room.”

— Keith Olbermann

14. “Even on the greatest teams, there’s always one role player.”

— Keith Olbermann

15. “As part of the process by which you hire me, you hire me. You just don’t hire an hour of me to do a performance.”

— Keith Olbermann

16. “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a mass turkey-murdering machine? Looks like about 15 feet.”

— Keith Olbermann

17. “Abraham Lincoln did not shoot John Wilkes Booth. Titanic did not sink a North Atlantic iceberg. And Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. These are simple historical facts intelligible to all adults, most children, and some of your more discerning domesticated animals. But not... to Bill O.”

— Keith Olbermann

18. “Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda – worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.”

— Keith Olbermann

19. “Fox News is hated because they’re elitists, and the worst winners television’s ever seen.”

— Keith Olbermann

20. “It’s very tough to get yourself around the idea that there could be a mechanism being used or abused to restrict and alter the society in which we live.”

— Keith Olbermann

21. “I can’t think of an instance at MSNBC where anything I said on the air was influenced by what was going on behind the scenes.”

— Keith Olbermann

22. “If you’re a baseball fan and you don’t know what BP is, you’re working in a mine without one of those helmets with the lights on it.”

— Keith Olbermann

23. “I’m difficult for management. That’s why I have the reputation because nobody challenges management.”

— Keith Olbermann

24. “Courage is a mutual thing.”

— Keith Olbermann

25. “It’s such a simple thing, really. It’s an awareness that the other people in the world are other people, and that you are one of them. That every time you have a chance to help somebody out, to do what’s right instead of what you think you’re supposed to do, you should do it.”

— Keith Olbermann

26. “Without humor, a sports fan is a religious fanatic. Without humor, a newscast is a terrible, depressing, unpalatable thing.”

— Keith Olbermann

27. “Anything that prevents you from taking an action or actions that might reasonably dispel legitimate anxieties. Fear is what paralyzes you.”

— Keith Olbermann

28. “I’m a natural management guy. I had forgotten that. And I forgot how much I hate it.”

— Keith Olbermann

29. “At Current, television is all we do – that’s our business. We don’t have amusement parks I have to worry about, we don’t have environmental cases against us, we don’t have a series of outdoor-advertising companies.”

— Keith Olbermann

30. “Because I am so intensely identified with opinion and analysis and contextualization, I think I just need, for my own psychological benefit, a small island in which I can stand and say, ‘I’m going to sit this one out.’”

— Keith Olbermann

31. “One side sticks to the facts, and the other side is close to playing with its poop.”

— Keith Olbermann

32. “Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor – these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there’s a problem.”

— Keith Olbermann

33. “Fox News is worse than al Qaeda. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.”

— Keith Olbermann

34. “All the things that people like me supposedly don’t do, I do.”

— Keith Olbermann

35. “My last sort of crisis was about overcoming the people who were more interested in what I had done than what I was doing in the present.”

— Keith Olbermann

36. “The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want.”

— Keith Olbermann

37. “I don’t think there are huge divergences between my personality and what they see on TV. And I think that’s why I have been gainfully employed doing this. I’ll always deliver what an employer wants.”

— Keith Olbermann

38. “I stand up to people.”

— Keith Olbermann

39. “The idea of negotiating with the President of the United States runs contrary to everything that the Republicans have done since January 20, 2009.”

— Keith Olbermann

40. “Once the Republicans get rolling, they assume they’re going to win everything. They are zealots, and zealots assume the last five percent of whatever their plan is will be taken care of by their own greatness or momentum or divinity.”

— Keith Olbermann

41. “Just a threat of a boycott has got the Russians spinning.”

— Keith Olbermann

42. “Reagan’s dead, and he was a lousy President.”

— Keith Olbermann

43. “I have achieved what I wanted to achieve. I’m better off at some sort of independent place where they not only like what I produce but also trust me to be the one to produce it.”

— Keith Olbermann