Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are drowning in information.
'Veep' is a great satire of democracy.
I am a deeply awkward person; I am not cool.
I had never really planned on being a speechwriter.
When in doubt, mock the powerful, not the powerless.
Everybody hates Congress; even Congress hates Congress.
Making '1600 Penn' was really fun, and I learned a lot.
I don't live in the city of L.A. I live in West Hollywood.
'1600 Penn' was a hit. It's 2018. Anything you want can be true.
There's only so much mistrust we can take before things get much worse.
Life tests our willingness, in ways large and small, to tell the truth.
I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.
Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money.
The Internet didn't cause Donald Trump, and it certainly can't solve Donald Trump.
One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.
Kellyanne Conway is one of the most dishonest humans ever to grace the office she holds.
It's so unfair that Barack Obama, this cool, charming guy, also has good comedic timing.
We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.
The one thing I didn't want to do was a show about the White House. I was too close to it.
I'm motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It's a joke, but I don't think I don't mean it.
I worked on one speech about the financial system that caused the Dow to drop, like, 200 points.
It's certainly true that presidents have confidantes who rise above what you would call just staff.
Humor is a way of saying we're all seeing the same ridiculous, absurd, infuriating things together.
I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.
There is an incredible appetite out there for in-depth, high-level conversations about what's going on.
'The West Wing' was an incredible, inspiring show - and one of the reasons I wanted to be a speechwriter.
We don't want people to be afraid of saying something interesting on the off chance it's taken the wrong way.
I went into politics for the reasons most people do: ambition, self-righteousness, and a desire to help others.
Humor connects us, especially in politics. It's a way of surprising one another with shared context and experience.
It doesn't matter what the early votes look like. It doesn't matter what the polls look like. We can lose everything.
Trump is a raptor testing the fences, and he found weaknesses to escape and try things that would work, every single day.
I spent three years working at the White House and wanted to do something that wasn't about passing bills and resolutions.
We need to stop telling each other to shut up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to shut up.
If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news, it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.
One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.
We've been dealing with censorship around multimedia, about multinational companies and the content they create, for a very long time.
Barack Obama took office in the middle of a massive financial crisis. He was handed a bunch of messes all around the world and at home.
I'm not insulting Trump supporters; I'm calling the people that CNN puts on television terrible representatives of the views of conservatives.
More and more people support equality for their gay friends and neighbors, and that is not because the 'Duck Dynasty' guy almost lost his show.
I personally believe that Donald Trump being elected president is a national emergency and a crisis that stems from a great cascade of failures.
One thing that is for certain is that there are tens of millions of people who are deeply unsatisfied with the way they get their political news.
The great thing about writing jokes for President Obama is that he is not afraid to tell jokes that are actually funny - and not just funny for a politician.
There are a lot of heartbroken, anxious people that thought better of their country. We're heartbroken by how far Trump has gotten to the most powerful position in the world.
Sometimes you're going to be inexperienced, naive, untested, and totally right. And then, in those moments, you have to make a choice: is this a time to speak up, or hang back?
It is extremely chilling that Donald Trump views the spectacle of choosing cabinet appointments in a way that is similar to deciding whether or not to fire Lil Jon or Joan Rivers.
Part of my job as a presidential speechwriter (along with great writers like Jon Favreau and David Axelrod) was finding that sliver where 'presidential' and 'actually funny' overlap.
A great speech can make you remember something about what you believe, about who you are, about who you want to be. It's rare when that kind of thing happens. But it is important, and it is real.
Most of my time at the White House, I wrote very unfunny speeches, but every year, I would work on the correspondents' dinner, which was a reminder of this other kind of writing that I loved to do.
We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.
If you can make someone laugh about something that your opponent or your opposition thinks, that means you've done a really good job of highlighting what's wrong with their argument or their position.