Richard Belzer

“My grandmother was very funny. It skipped a generation.”

“Exercise is the fountain of youth, I believe.”

“I went to several public schools. I went to religious school. I was thrown out of Hebrew school, which was the final straw. They said, 'God doesn't like you anymore. Go eat pork.'”

“One person, one vote sounds so reasonable and - dare I say it - democratic. But the voting process in America is anything but fair and balanced.”

“Most people cherish their very existence and try their best to live a life worth living. In spite of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in our way, we somehow hope against hope and find a way to be as life-affirming as humanly possible! How? Love!”

“I think we make fun of the things that scare us the most.”

“'SNL' came out in the '70s. It's a different zeitgeist. It's hard to re-create it, just as it would be hard to do a black-and-white noir film now. The culture's different.”

“If ever there was a misnomer in the political lexicon, surely 'values voters' is the all-time champ. The use of this term to describe the so-called base of the Republicans' so-called party mainly refers to an extremist, ultra-conservative, strain of so-called Christian conservatives.”

“In 1985, I was the host of a talk show, 'Hot Properties on Lifetime.' Hulk Hogan was on the show. He put me in a headlock and rendered me unconscious and let me fall to the ground. I split my head open and got nine stitches - and this was on live TV.”

“You remember France, it's the country that financed the American Revolution... OK, it was in their self-interest, but still, they made it happen. Let's face it: without the French, there would be no America... in other words, without them, there is no us.”

“I am not a cop. Really. I've just been playing one on television so long that people get a little confused sometimes.”

“The number one job for me is to make people laugh. If I can also make people think, then that's a cool thing.”

“It's this patronizing thing that people have about if you're against the war, everyone's lumped together. You know, the soldiers are not scholars; they're not war experts.”

“I'm a huge Obama supporter.”

“If any animal is capable of unconditional love, it is surely the canine: they are forgiving, caring, life-affirming creatures who humble us and teach us to be more human and compassionate.”

“Arguably, the first five years of 'Saturday Night Live' were some of the most radical things ever seen on television. When NBC said, 'Okay, you can do a show from 11:30 to 1 on Saturday night,' they didn't think anyone would watch. It was like giving a piece of the candy store to the kids.”

“Do you know what happens when you play a country song backwards? You get your wife back, your dog back and your job back.”

“If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you're telling the truth, even if what you're saying is total crap.”

“I used to think of it as a joke that all paranoids were right. That was a joke in the '60s, but now I'm convinced that people should be paranoid reflexively - and then pare it down from there if there's any indication that they're wrong.”

“Scholastically, I did enough to get by, but I was smarter than I let on.”