Al Franken Quotations

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

I am a Minnesotan, and not just because I root for the Vikings and the Twins. I like the Minnesota-nice sensibility. I like the liberal tradition; I like the Hubert Humphrey tradition fighting for civil rights.

Apple has long been a leading innovator of mobile technology; I myself own an iPhone.

You can't change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret.

Progressives, in a way, are the new conservatives. We want to conserve what we fought to build.

The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers - one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times - both in war, and in peace.

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

The institutions that we've built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don't apply to the private sector. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to Silicon Valley. And you can't impeach Google if it breaks its 'Don't be evil' campaign pledge.

It's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.

National security laws must protect national security. But they must also protect the public trust and preserve the ability of an informed electorate to hold its government to account.

The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.

I think Hell exists on Earth. It's a psychological state, or it can be a physical state. People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell. I think there are all kinds of different hells. It's not a place you go to after you die.

As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.

I don't think I'm an angry person. I think I'm a person who's angry. I'm angry at the Bush administration; I'm angry at the right wing media. And by that I don't mean the media is right wing. I mean, there is a part of the media that's not the mainstream media. That's Fox, that is 'The Wall Street Journal' editorial page.

Veterans report that service dogs help break their isolation. People will often avert their eyes when they see a wounded veteran. But when the veteran has a dog, the same people will come up and say, 'Hi' to pet the dog and then strike up a conversation.

Teen pregnancy went way down in the '90s, and 75 percent of it was because of increased use of contraception.

You have to love your country like an adult loves somebody, not like a child loves its mommy. And right-wing Republicans tend to love America like a child loves its mommy, where everything Mommy does is okay. But adult love means you're not in denial, and you want the loved one to be the best they can be.

My spiritual life is... sometimes I have access to it and sometimes I don't. When I do have access to it, it's usually a sense of my understanding what the best course of action or the best thing for me to do. By best, I mean when I have a real sense of doing the right thing and doing good for people and the connected universe of everybody.

If you use a cell phone - as I do - your wireless carrier likely has records about your physical movements going back months, if not years.

Sometimes if I tell people, 'I'm afraid that I'm really a fraud,' or 'I have a lot of self-doubt,' they go, 'Oh, no, you're kidding.' I go, 'No, I'm really honest.'

To make the argument that the media has a left- or right-wing, or a liberal or a conservative bias, is like asking if the problem with Al-Qaeda is do they use too much oil in their hummus.

But in the right-wing media, they do have a right-wing bias. And they also have an agenda. So their agenda is: we're an adjunct of the Republican Party, and we're going push that agenda every day, and, as you say, brand these stories that help further the right-wing cause.

If someone hacks your password, you can change it - as many times as you want. You can't change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret.

Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks.

I know that it's probably not a good idea for a comedian, especially a satirist, to support a public policy group or a politician. This is something I learned only too well years ago when I did a fundraiser for Pol Pot. A few years later I saw 'The Killing Fields,' and I've got to tell you, I just felt like a schmuck.

I think the Internet has developed at this incredibly rapid pace because of net neutrality, because of the free nature of it, because a YouTube can start the way YouTube started.

I grew up in Minnesota, where we treasure our tradition of civic engagement - and our record of having the nation's highest voter participation.

Most Americans don't think about antitrust law when they look at their cable bill, flip channels on TV, or worry about what their favorite website knows about them. But they should.

Some of George W. Bush's friends say that Bush believes God called him to be president during these times of trial. But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. 'That worked for everyone else,' God said.

I also focus on Bush and his administration - who do a lot of lying - and how a right-wing media has allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff that, in a different media environment, they probably wouldn't be able to get away with.

Technology is an incredible tool - it connects people to each other, creates jobs all over the world, and makes life easier for millions of Americans.

Antitrust law isn't about protecting competing businesses from each other, it's about protecting competition itself on behalf of the public.

The government must give proper weight to both keeping America safe from terrorists and protecting Americans' privacy. But when Americans lack the most basic information about our domestic surveillance programs, they have no way of knowing whether we're getting that balance right. This lack of transparency is a big problem.

In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.

Terrorism, to me, is the use of terror for political purpose, and terror is indiscriminate murder of civilians to make a political point.

When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both.

To ask whether the mainstream media has a conservative or liberal bias is like asking whether al-Qaida uses too much oil in their hummus. It's - I think they might use too much oil in their hummus - but it's the wrong question.

Changing technologies, changing marketplaces, and even changing trends in anti-competitive practices have all presented challenges to antitrust enforcement.

The nature of the Internet and the importance of net neutrality is that innovation can come from everyone.

Humor and seriousness are not in opposition to each other.

Too many people don't protect their smartphones with a password or PIN. I anticipate that Apple's fingerprint reader will in fact make iPhone 5S owners more likely to secure their smartphones.

You might not like that Facebook shares your political opinions with Politico, but are you really going to delete all the photos, all the posts, all the connections - the presence you've spent years establishing on the world's dominant social network?

My dad always told me to stand up to bullies, and Bill O'Reilly is kind of a bully, and he's the kind of kid who hits other kids on the playground. And when you hit him, he runs to the teacher and says, 'Teacher, sue him.'

Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world.

My dad didn't graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time.

There is - I mean - I found early in life that righteous indignation is a little off-putting, and so I try to couch it with humor.

I've never understood why we would want to deny all the joys - and the challenges - of marriage to anyone. Which is why I think any loving, committed couple - gay or straight - should be able to get married.

At 'SNL,' I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in '95, I could let my own beliefs out.

If you use Facebook - as I do - Facebook in all likelihood has a unique digital file of your face, one that can be as accurate as a fingerprint and that can be used to identify you in a photo of a large crowd.

Let's not let the government sell us out. Let's fight for net neutrality.

I think the government has a role in protecting the fundamental rights of its citizens.

It's the Power of the Almighty, the Splendor of Nature, and then you.

Net neutrality isn't a government takeover of the Internet, as many of my Republican colleagues have alleged.

When you win an election, what you really win is a chance to go to work for working families who need a voice in Minnesota.

Anybody who deliberately propagandizes with lies should be held up to scorn and ridicule.

I think that the default for collecting any kind of personal data should be opt-in consent.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

There's plenty of room for humor in politics, God knows, but it's a serious business.

Armed with nothing more than a Facebook user's phone number and home address, anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars can obtain personal information they should never have access to, including a user's date of birth, e-mail address, or estimated income.

If you hear, day after day, liberals are rooting against armed forces, that is eventually going to have an effect on soldiers and troops who are actually going to believe that and it's wrong. It's just wrong.

During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.

Yeah, but you need an experienced radio veteran who is a liberal advocate. And there just hadn't been any radio that did that. And so they weren't trained - they had developed all these bad habits of being objective and balanced and stuff like that.

The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I've had to learn a little bit about it. It's not rocket science: You get ratings, that's good.

There's no comparison between NPR and the propaganda that you hear from Rush or from Sean Hannity, the news movement conservatives that are just laying out, slathering out the disinformation and the lies, as I discuss in my book, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.'

I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a chance for me to do anything I wanted.

If 98 out of 100 doctors tell me I've got a problem, I should take their advice. And if those two other doctors get paid by Big Snack Food, like certain climate deniers get paid by Big Coal, I shouldn't take their advice.

My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate - he didn't have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.

People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are, with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values.

The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it - politics - was important... that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.

There's an appeal to the American sense of exceptionalism, that we're morally superior, as way to not be self-critical. I think that's a bit dangerous.

I think Clinton fatigue was a real thing. It's just hard to get comfortable with Gore - it was hard for him to project who he is, the person people know in private.

We need to start by having a conversation about climate change. It would be irresponsible to avoid the issue just because it's uncomfortable to talk about.

Bob Dole used to be really funny. Barney Frank can be kind of funny. Bob Kerrey has a good sense of humor.

If you look at terrorists, they really have no sense of humor.

I want to reclaim 'liberal.' I'm a liberal, and I think most Americans are liberals.

Gary Bauer is a very good - he's a good friend of mine.

If I put myself on the ballot and even 50 people voted for me, it'd be a travesty.

Demagoguery sells. And therefore, radio stations will put it on. But that doesn't mean that you can't do something else and also make it sell.

I just can't sit still and meditate; that doesn't kind of work for me. I don't even know exactly what it means.

Let's keep the Internet weird. Let's keep the Internet free.

Service dogs raise their masters' sense of well-being.

We need to prepare our kids for a 21st Century economy, and we're not doing it with our schools.

I believe people have a right to know what's going on with their information and how it's collected, how it's stored and who gets it.

Minnesotans know the difference between the job of satirist and the job of senator. And so do I.

My dad loved comedians, especially George Jessel, and he loved Henny Youngman and Buddy Hackett.

Net neutrality has been in place since the very beginning of the Internet.

I listen to NPR when I listen to the radio, but I don't listen to the radio that much. You know, I listen to Garrison Keillor, I listen to 'Prairie Home Companion.'

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.

The Medicare Part D prescription drug bill, which might be the most corrupt piece of legislation in history, was a huge giveaway of taxpayer funds to the big pharmaceutical companies.

We owe an historic debt to American Indians. They have a unique set of concerns that haven't been addressed, and I'd like to stand with them. Also, I'd like to get their views on immigration.

Call-time has renewed my faith in the need for public financing of elections. 'Call-time' is where I as the candidate, sit in a room with my 'call-time manager,' and a phone. Then I call people and ask them for money. For hours. Apparently, I'm really good at it.

Google's screen for privacy settings does give you more options for what you share than Apple's does. But it's not a complete list, and people aren't aware of whether or not that information will go to a third party.

I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.

I'm part of the mushball middle. I consider 'confused' the majority position because, thankfully, most people would rather be uncertain some of the time than 100% positive all the time - even when they're wrong.

If Republicans eliminate Medicare, America will become a country in which you can never retire - and once you physically can no longer work, you are desperately poor until you die.

It's hard to have that debate around secret programs authorized by secret legal opinions issued by a secret court. Actually, it's impossible to have that debate.

Minnesotans lost their jobs because the credit rating agencies didn't do the only job they're supposed to have, the only job they had, which is to give accurate, objective ratings to financial products.

My dad never graduated high school. He was a printing salesman. We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren't rich - but we felt secure.

Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and the changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a 'living' document.

Part of the middle class promise is that, after a lifetime of hard work, you'll be able to retire and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Medicare was established to secure that promise.