Top 52 Quotes of W. Kamau Bell
Women don’t get the benefits of America the way men do.
W. Kamau Bell
Whenever I tell people in Berkeley, Calif., where I live, that I’m headed to the beach in Alabama, they are shocked. Most people outside of the Gulf Coast have no idea that Alabama has beaches – even though if you look at a map of Alabama, there is a part of it that looks as if it should belong to Florida.
W. Kamau Bell
When we let cops talk about themselves as a separate community, then we are letting cops wall themselves off from the rest of us. We don’t generally do that with any other jobs. We don’t talk about the barista community or the Wal-Mart greeter community.
W. Kamau Bell
When we filmed the premiere episode of ‘United Shades of America,’ it was like we were turning over a rock in the woods. The KKK was not part of the national conversation. They were really just a punchline for comedians when you needed to let the audience know something was really, really, really racist.
W. Kamau Bell
When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it ‘Cal-LEE-fornia,’ he was right – he just didn’t realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish.
W. Kamau Bell
We really suffer from a hot-take disease, wanting to be the first one who has the hottest take.
W. Kamau Bell
We all need to make sure that we fully understand our country.
W. Kamau Bell
To be off the grid is to be disconnected from most of America’s infrastructure without having to cross any border.
W. Kamau Bell
There’s no religion in this country that is more misunderstood, mis-categorized, and misidentified than Islam.
W. Kamau Bell
The size of the city and the nature of how independent the neighborhoods are means that not only do people who live outside Chicago not know what is going on there, Chicagoans often don’t know what is going on there.
W. Kamau Bell
The Olympics are great, but they only truly mean something when the moments that come out of them are bigger than the individual sports.
W. Kamau Bell
The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party.
W. Kamau Bell
The citizens of Puerto Rico pay taxes with no representation every day, because Puerto Rico is not a state. And the rules only became more confusing the more I looked into them during my time there.
W. Kamau Bell
The alt-right is working hard to cloak its desire to create chaos in the streets as free speech. They say they want to air their views, but it’s about provoking violent reactions. We all can easily see that this is not about free speech.
W. Kamau Bell
The alt-right is the Tea Party’s younger, cooler, meaner brother. Like if the movie ‘Back to The Future’ was just about Biff.
W. Kamau Bell
That’s how to make a stand-up comedian: You take a person who is uncomfortable and try to squirrel their way out of it through humor.
W. Kamau Bell
Since its inception, the government has broken and coerced treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes. And this is even worse when you realize that the native peoples of this land are negotiating for land that is, by all common sense and elementary school logic, their land.
W. Kamau Bell
Shouldn’t one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren’t we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?
W. Kamau Bell
Puerto Rico is complicated. The people are complicated. The history is complicated. The story of the United States’ relationship to Puerto Rico is complicated.
W. Kamau Bell
People live in their part of the Union, and if they don’t travel a lot, then there is a tendency to believe that the other parts of America couldn’t possibly be as American as their part. You can see it in the way people in the South scrunch up their faces when they hear words like ‘New York,’ ‘Chicago,’ and ‘challah.’
W. Kamau Bell
People born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens – except for the teeny, tiny, mind-boggling fact that if you live in Puerto Rico, you are not allowed to cast a vote in the election for president. That tiny fact starts to get bigger when you realize that electing our own leaders is the whole reason that we have a country in the first place.
W. Kamau Bell
People always want narratives to be clean and easy.
W. Kamau Bell
One thing that people outside Chicago need to understand is that the city is not just one thing. It is one city, but it is huge and sprawling. And historically, it has been one of America’s most segregated cities.
W. Kamau Bell
My dad and stepmom live in Mobile, Ala., and spend their vacation time an hour’s drive away in Orange Beach, Ala. This means that, throughout my life, I have regularly vacationed there as well.
W. Kamau Bell
Most prisons in this country are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it much easier for us all to throw those people away. Out of sight, out of mind.
W. Kamau Bell
Knowing that more people associate Chicago with street violence than generosity is difficult for me because, despite all my proclamations of being from the Bay Area, I have spent much of my life in Chicago. So I have a deep love and a pretty good understanding of the city.
W. Kamau Bell
I’ve turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that’s where I live.
W. Kamau Bell
I’ve been to the Bahamas. It’s a beautiful country with truly excellent people. When I took a cruise that docked for a couple hours in Nassau, it mostly reminded me of a giant version of my grandmother’s neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama… but with better accents.
W. Kamau Bell
In the deep corner of my heart, I’m a Chicagoan, but it’s been covered over by 20 years of living in the Bay Area.
W. Kamau Bell
I’m just another non-native whose mom told him we were part-Cherokee.
W. Kamau Bell
I’m happy that I know how to speak ‘Southern.’ I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. ‘Y’all’ is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.
W. Kamau Bell
If I say ‘political comedian,’ then people think you’re talking about you, the Senate and Congress, and what’s going on in Washington D.C. If I say ‘comedian,’ people automatically assume that you’re a comedian who talks about how his wife won’t listen to him and that dummy down at the mechanic who wouldn’t fix his car.
W. Kamau Bell
I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, ‘Yay! I’m so happy!’ It’s easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the ‘isms’ instead, but we can’t all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well… it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.
W. Kamau Bell
I only halfway paid attention in high school Spanish class, and it may be too late now to catch up, no matter how many levels of Rosetta Stone I order.
W. Kamau Bell
I never wanted to be in the late-night talk show wars, and I think somehow with ‘Totally Biased,’ I got caught up in all that. Suddenly, there are articles about how we finally have a black voice in late-night.
W. Kamau Bell
I have always had a strange relationship to Portland, Oregon. It’s a great city. The people who live there love it openly and loudly, and it regularly appears on the lists of best American cities. But something has always felt weird to me about Portland. And not in the way Portlanders mean ‘weird’ in their slogan ‘Keep Portland weird.’
W. Kamau Bell
I grew up in a household where we talked about race all the time, and that’s sort of in me. So if I become the Anthony Bourdain of race and culture, then great!
W. Kamau Bell
I feel like, as a black guy, I can’t not believe in God… I’d wake up in the morning, ‘I’m black, and there’s no God? I’m going back to sleep.’
W. Kamau Bell
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be one of the indigenous people of the United States of America. I can’t imagine watching the news every day – as people debate whose country this is and who should be in charge of it and how to make it great again – and hardly ever see your people brought into the discussion.
W. Kamau Bell
I am proud to be black man.
W. Kamau Bell
I am a comedian: that means I laugh at things other people don’t laugh at and also annoys my wife sometimes.
W. Kamau Bell
Growing up in the Midwest, Boston, and Alabama, I didn’t know any Puerto Ricans… at least, I didn’t know if I knew any Puerto Ricans. The only Puerto Rican that I had ever even heard of was Juan Epstein, one of the students from the classic 1970s sitcom ‘Welcome Back, Kotter.’
W. Kamau Bell
For some people, the definition of who is and who isn’t an American defies logic, historical accuracy, common sense, decency, good manners, the milk of human kindness, enjoyment in the good things in life, and love of good food.
W. Kamau Bell
Even if the KKK isn’t the outsized presence it once was in this country, many of its principles and ideas are alive and well.
W. Kamau Bell
Donald Trump giving a speech on Islam is like me giving a speech titled, ‘The Best Haircuts to Have If You Really Want to Succeed in Corporate America.’ I could do it. But I’d mostly be making it up as I went along.
W. Kamau Bell
Comedy can be very deep sometimes.
W. Kamau Bell
Chicago is a world-class city filled with amazing people with big ideas.
W. Kamau Bell
Atheism is like the highest level of white privilege. It’s like having a black belt in white privilege.
W. Kamau Bell
At worst, spring break in Daytona Beach feels feral – like everybody is trying to re-create scenes from the movie ‘The Hangover.’
W. Kamau Bell
As a black person in this country, I am always frustrated by the lack of attention my people’s issues get. But at least the news and politicians are talking about not talking about our issues. Native issues are basically ignored.
W. Kamau Bell
America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.
W. Kamau Bell
America loses so much of what defines it if you subtract the Chinese influence. I know this because I spent 12 years living in one of America’s most popular tourist destinations: San Francisco. And it would not be one of America’s top tourist destinations without Chinatown.
W. Kamau Bell