W. Kamau Bell Quotes

"I want President Obama to want to take your guns away. I don't trust you with your guns. I don't trust you to fire them safely. I don't trust you to store them safely. I don't trust your kids not to find them. I don't trust you not to get them stolen."

"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.'"

"At worst, spring break in Daytona Beach feels feral - like everybody is trying to re-create scenes from the movie 'The Hangover.'"

"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."

"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."

"You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world."

"You don't get smarter by not learning stuff."

"People always want narratives to be clean and easy."

"Chicago is a world-class city filled with amazing people with big ideas."

"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."

"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.'"

"Atheism is like the highest level of white privilege. It's like having a black belt in white privilege."

"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!"

"Comedy can be very deep sometimes."

"I am a comedian: that means I laugh at things other people don't laugh at and also annoys my wife sometimes."

"I am proud to be black man."

"Women don't get the benefits of America the way men do."

"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."

"The Olympics are great, but they only truly mean something when the moments that come out of them are bigger than the individual sports."

"The alt-right is the Tea Party's younger, cooler, meaner brother. Like if the movie 'Back to The Future' was just about Biff."

"We all need to make sure that we fully understand our country."

"Puerto Rico is complicated. The people are complicated. The history is complicated. The story of the United States' relationship to Puerto Rico is complicated."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party."

"America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet."

"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."