comedy ingredients

 

"Advantages and disadvantages - every life to some degree has them."

- Bill Maher

on marriage

"A sibling relationship with occasional moments of incest."
- (a single) Bill Maher [born 1956]

on philandering

"He's a hard dog to keep on the porch."
- Attributed by Bill Maher [born 1956] to Hillary Clinton [born 1947]

anxiety therapy

"If you're not wasted, the day is."
- Bill Maher [born 1956]

"The difference between a cult leader and a world leader is oil."
- Bill Maher

Image source here.

sexual abuse

stand up

"Go back far enough in any great man's life, and you will eventually get to the stuff he did or said before he was great or even a man ... Trying to define a person's current self by their past self is the worst kind of gotcha. Our mistakes from the past are just that—mistakes, and most of the time it was necessary to make them in order to become the wiser person we then became ... Yes, if only hindsight could come without having to mess up first. And believe me, I have the platform shoes to prove that one."

- Bill Maher [born 1956], New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer, p. 170

God Delusion

A study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from.

A study in the leading journal Nature by Larson and Witham in 1998 showed that of those American scientists considered eminent enough by peers to have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences [equivalent to being a Fellow of the Royal Society in Britain] only about 7 percent believe in a personal God. This overwhelming preponderance of atheists is almost the exact opposite of the profile of the American population at large, of whom more than 90 percent are believers in some sort of supernatural being. The figure for less eminent scientists, not elected to the National Academy, is intermediate. As with the more distinguished sample, religious believers are in the minority, but a less dramatic minority of about 40 percent...What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.

- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp.126-7

Religious Secularist

If John McCain knew how to use the Internet he'd be steamed. A Brit, a Canadian, two Americans.