John William Oliver is a British-American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. Oliver started his career as a stand-up comedian in the United Kingdom. He came to wider attention for his work in the United States on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as its senior British correspondent from 2006 to 2013. Oliver won three Primetime Emmy Awards for writing for The Daily Show and was its guest host for an eight-week period in 2013. These John Oliver quotes will motivate you.
Best John Oliver Quotes
- “You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ or ‘Do owls exist?’ or ‘Are there hats?'” ~ John Oliver
- “Democracy is like a tambourine, not everyone can be trusted with it.” ~ John Oliver
- “Drug companies are a bit like high school boyfriends – they’re much more concerned with getting inside you than being effective once they’re in there.” ~ John Oliver
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“Economics is like the Dutch language – I’m told it makes sense, but I have my doubts.” ~ John Oliver
- “I think the best analogy for where we are right now is that America is Elvis Presley — the most beautiful, talented, rebellious nation in the history of Earth. And now, you’re in your Vegas years. You’ve squeezed yourself into a white jumpsuit, you’re wheezing your way through ‘Love Me Tender’ and you might be about to pass away bloated on the toilet. But you’re still the King.” ~ John Oliver
- “Believe it or not the war on Iraq is based on a sound scientific principle, The beehive principle. Which clearly states that if you are stung by a bee, you should follow it back to its nest and then proceed to beat nest to a pulp with a baseball bat until the stripey little turd has learned its lesson.” ~ John Oliver
- “One thing that America is objectively exceptional at is overreacting whenever anyone accuses them of not being exceptional.” ~ John Oliver
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“Everybody should care about facts. That is something all of us should agree on.” ~ John Oliver
- “The Confederate flag is one of those things that should only be seen on t-shirts, belt buckles and bumper stickers to help the rest of us identify the worst people in the world.” ~ John Oliver
- “News is not a game show. You don’t win a car if you happen to be right.” ~ John Oliver
- “I’m British. I don’t really have access to my emotions on a daily basis.” ~ John Oliver
- “If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.” ~ John Oliver
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“You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact.” ~ John Oliver
- “According to current Florida law you can get a gun, follow an unarmed minor, call the police, have them explicitly tell you to stop following [the minor] and choose to ignore that, keep following the minor, get into a confrontation with them, and if at any point during that process you get scared you can shoot the minor to death, and the state of Florida will say, ‘Well, look: you did what you could.'” ~ John Oliver
- “It’s a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife-edge.” ~ John Oliver
- “I guess the tone of jokes is often, at best, irreverent, but it always comes from a place of deep love.” ~ John Oliver
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“Anybody who claims to be excited for April Fools’ Day is probably a sociopath.” ~ John Oliver
- “I think deep down, this planet yearns for the days of the British Empire again. They long once more to be treated that badly, that politely. We did far worse things than you can possibly dream of, but we did it with that certainly gentlemanly swagger… Dreadfully sorry, but we seem to have crushed your entire continent’s infrastructure. Allow me to make it up to you by offering you a job 4,000 miles away. No, no, I insist.” ~ John Oliver
- “I care about facts the way I care about oxygen and imbibing enough water a day to live.” ~ John Oliver
- “I get nostalgic for British negativity. There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers. When you go back to Britain, everybody is just running everything down. It’s like whatever the opposite of a hug is.” ~ John Oliver
- “Ads are baked into content like chocolate chips into a cookie. Except, it’s actually more like raisins into a cookie – because nobody f---ing wants them there.” ~ John Oliver
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“Mr. President, no one is saying you broke any laws, we’re just saying it’s a little bit weird you didn’t have to.” ~ John Oliver
- “Congress never loses its capacity to disappoint you.” ~ John Oliver
- “As a general rule, no one should ever be allowed to say there is no history of racial tension here, because that sentence has never been true anywhere on Earth.” ~ John Oliver
- “Once you learn how to make people laugh, then you get to choose exactly how you want to make them laugh.” ~ John Oliver
- “People are always going to say stupid things, and you’re always going to be able to make jokes about that, but it should be the last thing you add-in, because it’s the easiest thing.” ~ John Oliver
- “Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury.” ~ John Oliver
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“Pumpkin spice lattes are egg nog for morning people.” ~ John Oliver
- “Florida, just because you’re shaped like some combination of a gun and a d*ck doesn’t mean you have to act that way.” ~ John Oliver
- “There are some people who watch NASCAR for the highly skilled driving – but most people watch it for the crashes.” ~ John Oliver Quotes
- “Being a Mets fan is like lending someone a lot of money and you just know that you’ll never get paid back.” ~ John Oliver
- “Southern people are bigger-hearted and kinder than I had any right to expect.” ~ John Oliver
- “Politics has become infused with narcissism in America.” ~ John Oliver
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“When you’re dealing with serious subjects, there is a pressure to be absolutely sure that you know what you’re doing.” ~ John Oliver
- “Sometimes it’s good to remember how bad food can be, so you can enjoy the concept of flavour to the fullest.” ~ John Oliver
- “The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you’ve probably already done something very, very wrong.” ~ John Oliver
- “I do one accent – my own. I can make it louder or quieter. That is the sum total of my vocal range. I thought I could do an American accent until I tried it in front of an American – the expression of horror is still burnt onto my retinas.” ~ John Oliver
- “The moment I accept that there’s an artistic, redeeming quality in puns, I have a horrible feeling I’ll get hooked.” ~ John Oliver
- “The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.” ~ John Oliver
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“I feel more at home knowing I’m not really at home. It takes all the pressure off you trying to fit in!” ~ John Oliver
- “Congratulations, Congress! 77% disapproval rating! You may be about to become the English language’s most offensive C-word.” ~ John Oliver
- “When I heard that Hitler had problems with flatulence, it’s funny. What – does that make him a funny man? No. It means he had funny moments when his rear end was speaking louder than his mouth.” ~ John Oliver Quotes
- “I think Americans still can’t help but respond to the natural authority of this voice. Deep down they long to be told what to do by a British accent. That’s why so many infomercials have British people.” ~ John Oliver
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“You’re sonically racist, Americans. You think we all sound the same, whereas I have definitely a mongrel accent.” ~ John Oliver
- “The only thing I’m nervous about is talking to guests like human beings because all of my interviews so far have been attacking people. I have a genuine concern about sitting across from an actor whose movies I obviously haven’t seen.” ~ John Oliver
- “I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.” ~ John Oliver
- “If your name is Sepp, at the bare minimum you’ve strangled someone in a bar fight.” ~ John Oliver
- “I’m always interested in audience interaction. Not so much aggressive audience interaction – I’m genuinely interested in how people see things.” ~ John Oliver
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“Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.” ~ John Oliver
- “My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there – I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen’s butler.” ~ John Oliver
- “You don’t really know when stand-up material is TV-ready; it’s just at what point you’re willing to let it go and not work on it anymore. I’m not sure there is a point at which you think: ‘And that is finished.'” ~ John Oliver
- “You know that things are not going well when you lose the moral high ground to a TMZ reporter.” ~ John Oliver
- “I can’t relax. I find vacations problematic.” ~ John Oliver
- “Iran is the middle child of the Axis of Evil. Iraq is the oldest child and gets the lion’s share of the attention, and North Korea is the crazy baby.” ~ John Oliver
- “In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don’t really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face.” ~ John Oliver
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“We invented words; we’ll tell you how they’re supposed to sound.” ~ John Oliver
- “Australia turns out to be a sensational place, albeit one of the most comfortably racist places I’ve ever been in. They’ve really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper.” ~ John Oliver
- “A Southern accent is not a club in my bag.” ~ John Oliver
- “My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I’ve got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it’s possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.” ~ John Oliver
- “I would hate to meet myself at 15.” ~ John Oliver
- “It’s exciting to have a role in anything that’s Claymation, just because you’re always intrigued by what a clay wizard version of yourself would be.” ~ John Oliver
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“When you see people say crazy things on our show, they mean this stuff, and that’s easy to forget: They’re not joking.” ~ John Oliver
- “You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn’t be when it is literally your job.” ~ John Oliver
- “There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers.” ~ John Oliver
- “I think being an outsider in general always helps you in comedy. I think it helps to have an outsider’s eye. And so I have an outsider’s voice. You know, as soon as I start talking, I don’t belong here. And I think that helps in a way.” ~ John Oliver
