Al Franken Quotes

Most of us here in the media are what I call infotainers...Rush Limbaugh is what I call a disinfotainer. He entertains by spreading disinformation.

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

During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

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

I'm sure I've devoted enough thought to Rush Limbaugh for one lifetime.

Most Americans don’t think about antitrust law when they look at their cable bill, flip channels on TV, or worry about what their favorite website knows about them. But they should.

It's not preppies, cause I'm a preppie myself. I just don't like homosexuals. If you ask me, they're all homosexuals in the Pudding. Hey, I was glad when that Pudding homosexual got killed in Philadelphia.

Net neutrality isn't a government takeover of the Internet, as many of my Republican colleagues have alleged.

I'm for Israel's right to exist.

Liberals don't hate America. We love America more than Ann Coulter does. I love it enough to engage my readers honestly.

If someone hacks your password, you can change it - as many times as you want. You can’t change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret.

I just can't sit still and meditate; that doesn't kind of work for me. I don't even know exactly what it means.

If you use a cell phone - as I do - your wireless carrier likely has records about your physical movements going back months, if not years.

It is my fondest wish that in the fullness of time, the American people will look back on the Franken presidency as something of a mixed bag and not as a complete disaster.

My dad was a terrible businessman.

I believe in not attacking a country pre-emptively unless you're sure of what you're doing and you're working with allies.

If you hear, day after day, liberals are rooting against armed forces, that is eventually going to have an effect on soldiers and troops who are actually going to believe that and it's wrong. It's just wrong.

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.

Sometimes if I tell people, 'I'm afraid that I'm really a fraud,' or 'I have a lot of self-doubt,' they go, 'Oh, no, you're kidding.' I go, 'No, I'm really honest.'

When you live in New York, one of two things happen - you either become a New Yorker, or you feel more like the place you came from.

There's plenty of room for humor in politics, God knows, but it's a serious business.

Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia.

The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.

If you use Facebook - as I do - Facebook in all likelihood has a unique digital file of your face, one that can be as accurate as a fingerprint and that can be used to identify you in a photo of a large crowd.

I'm the New York Jew who actually grew up in Minnesota.

Terrorism, to me, is the use of terror for political purpose, and terror is indiscriminate murder of civilians to make a political point.

Bob Dole used to be really funny. Barney Frank can be kind of funny. Bob Kerrey has a good sense of humor.

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

Whining is anger through a small opening.

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.

Net neutrality has been in place since the very beginning of the Internet.

Russia has a strategy of creating the conditions that give rise to corruption, then exploiting that corruption to its own benefit.

There's an appeal to the American sense of exceptionalism, that we're morally superior, as way to not be self-critical. I think that's a bit dangerous.

It's hard for a liberal to go on between Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, because it's like doing country music after hip-hop. I mean, just, the audience doesn't go from one to the other.

As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.

I think the government has a role in protecting the fundamental rights of its citizens.

My dad always told me to stand up to bullies, and Bill O'Reilly is kind of a bully, and he's the kind of kid who hits other kids on the playground. And when you hit him, he runs to the teacher and says, 'Teacher, sue him.'

There's no comparison between NPR and the propaganda that you hear from Rush or from Sean Hannity, the news movement conservatives that are just laying out, slathering out the disinformation and the lies, as I discuss in my book, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.'

You know, Lincoln was funny. I don't think F.D.R. was very funny. But Lincoln was funny. Lincoln was really funny. But I think you should get elected first, and then show that you're funny.

Well, I think that there's a value to comedy in and of itself.

I want to reclaim 'liberal.' I'm a liberal, and I think most Americans are liberals.

When a company is able to establish a dominant market position, consumers lose meaningful choices. You might not like that Facebook shares your political opinions with Politico, but are you really going to delete all the photos, all the posts, all the connections - the presence you’ve spent years establishing on the world’s dominant social network?

Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world.

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important 'cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.

It's really building Air America that I'm focused on, and for me, that almost only means doing a good show.

I'm a perfectionist and if I start making changes, I'll never stop.

Progressives, in a way, are the new conservatives. We want to conserve what we fought to build.