I can honestly say, after talking about my mom passing away, I got the biggest weight off of my chest. Comedy is my therapy. That’s how I deal with my problems, my personal battles. I talk about it. I give it to my fans. When they laugh at it, it’s a release, for lack of a better word.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

I am for people. I can’t help it.

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

Stand-up comedy is mine: it’s my entity; it’s my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

So many people live with anger and unforgiveness, and many of them are Christians.

I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

Men weren’t always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

I’ll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.

I don’t take pictures when I’m with my kids, for the sake of my kids. It’s important when you’re as busy as I am that you give your kids your time when you’re with them, and nothing compromises that. I’ve been lucky enough to have fans that understand that.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

Obama’s policies have been approximately the same as Bush’s, though there have been some slight differences, but that’s not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush’s policies.

God knows what we are going through when we grieve, and He wants to assure us of His love and concern. He also wants us to turn to Him and bring our heartaches and burdens to Him.

Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end… I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

We had problems like all families but we had a lot of love. I was extremely loved. We always felt we had each other.

I look after people.

My parents were just constantly affirming me in everything that I did. Late at night, I’d wake up and hear my mother talking over my bed, saying, ‚You’re going to do great on this test. You can do anything you want.‘

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

I’ve been a lot more into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, which was a bit complicated for me to understand the language of each social media, because they all talk in different ways. It’s a nice way for me to tell people I appreciate them, which I forget to do sometimes.

We think when God speaks to us, there’s going to be a boom out of Heaven or we’re going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it’s the Holy Spirit talking to us.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

If your man is a sports enthusiast, you may have to resign yourself to his spouting off in a monotone on a prize fight, football game or pennant race.

A letter does not blush.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

One thing that I tell people all the time is, ‚I’m not going to answer a call from you after nine o’clock at night or before nine o’clock in the morning unless it’s an emergency.‘

I’m not a one-man show. I was never that in my life, and I never want to be that.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Don’t ever call a guy first. The thing they want the most is whatever they can’t have. It sounds really juvenile, but it works.

So long as I’m Commander-in-Chief, we will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known. When you take off the uniform, we will serve you as well as you’ve served us – because no one who fights for this country should have to fight for a job, or a roof over their head, or the care that they need when they come home.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

In honorable dealing you should consider what you intended, not what you said or thought.

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.