Top 36 Kamau Quotes
#1. W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, & Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.
Vernon Reid
#2. You work enough with someone and you develop a shorthand. You know how he likes to work through the day and he knows where you're vulnerable and where your weaknesses and strengths are, so it makes for a good team, a team that knows who's over there behind your back.
David Strathairn
#4. It doesn't do any good to just be on the side of black people. The funnier comedic position is to be on the side of oppressed people in general.
W. Kamau Bell
#5. I don't need to sow any damn oats. What are you two, the supernatural version of Thelma and Louise?" "Hardly," Talia scoffed. "This car is a classic. No way would I drive it off a cliff.
A.E. Jones
#6. You pretty much have to be bad at it [stand-up] for several years to get good at it, so there's no avoiding embarrassing yourself.
W. Kamau Bell
#7. The worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.
Richard Ford
#8. When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.
W. Kamau Bell
#9. I think the need to go on stage speaks to some sort of a profound psychological deficit, but something that happened when you were a kid. Or something your parents did.
W. Kamau Bell
#10. I feel like you can share as many jokes as you want to because no joke you do on Twitter is ever gonna be so big on Twitter, for the most part, that you can't say it on stage that same night.
W. Kamau Bell
#11. You might not agree with something, but it doesn't mean you don't need to listen to it. White people have to accept that they don't always know about racism.
W. Kamau Bell
#12. I think a lot of people get into stand-up to be the center of attention, which is perfectly legitimate. But I think I got in there to be heard.
W. Kamau Bell
#13. Comedy is like expensive cheese. Well, it's like cheese, in general. Everybody likes what they like, and everything they don't like, they think is the worst.
W. Kamau Bell
#15. Some things just strike me as funny. The way things play out just makes me laugh sometimes. It drives my wife crazy sometimes because I'll just be laughing for no reason.
W. Kamau Bell
#16. The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
Edith Sitwell
#17. Paranoia is just a kind of awareness, and awareness is just another form of love.
Charles Manson
#18. Why would we have different races if God meant us to be alike and associate with each other?
Lester Maddox
#19. What do we have for veterans? Government-run health care. I understand that. Congressmen and senators ... they get five choices of government-run health care. Why should a congressman and senator get anything more than a regular citizen does? Why are they privileged and the rest of us aren't?
Jesse Ventura
#20. When the reality of power has been surrendered, it's playing a dangerous game to seek to retain the appearance of it; the external aspect of vigor can sometimes support a debilitated body, but most often it manages to deal it the final blow.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#21. Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.
Lorrie Moore
#22. Our fate and destiny is in our hands. Blaming others for our failures is wrong because we can independently choose our circumstances. Wake up, smell the coffee and roll up your sleeves.
Boniface Kamau Zablon
#23. I had knockback after knockback before I got anywhere. After I got my first record deal I thought that was it, then Gut Records went into liquidation. I was 20. I had no idea what that meant. I had a few days to get myself out of that contract or my work would be owned by someone else.
Jessie J.
#24. There's an elitism that comes out with the entertainment industry. I'll talk about some shows, but I'm not gonna say that you're dumb for watching one over the other. I just let it go. I don't have to declare a fatwa on any of these things. I've gotten over some of my elitism.
W. Kamau Bell
#25. It was just me and him, there in that place where tragedy had happened, where I thought my life had ended. But somehow, he made it seem like a home again.
Somehow, he gave it back to me.
T.J. Klune
#26. Mere acquisition isn't enough to establish a good habit
Gretchen Rubin
#27. I'm most biased about how white people have to learn to shut up when the conversation of racism comes up. White people have to learn to listen. Whether they agree with what they're hearing or not, they have to know to shut up and listen.
W. Kamau Bell
#28. I'm of the opinion that if you step on stage and you're not a straight white male, you're automatically making a political statement whether you know it or not.
W. Kamau Bell
#29. As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.
W. Kamau Bell
#30. The best version of comedy is when you can get to an issue where, at some point, you're not firmly on one side or the other, and you can see both sides. The more we become about the issues, the more successful we are.
W. Kamau Bell
#31. What am I unbiased about? Let's see. I don't think about being unbiased, at all. With the entertainment industry, there was a point at which I felt like I had to be not only pro-myself but anti-others.
W. Kamau Bell
#32. A person who knows spiritual principles will walk confidently in God's path, to fulfil what God has already planned to do
Sunday Adelaja
#33. What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.
Erik Naggum
#34. There is a linear way in which black comedians are expected to talk about race by all audiences - black people are like this, white people are like this - and it really is hard to break through that. I never was doing it that way.
W. Kamau Bell
#35. That's the nature of my [stand-up] act: black man with a white baby.
W. Kamau Bell
#36. If I could email my jokes to the crowd and get the same immediate response [as during stand-up], I'd do that.
W. Kamau Bell
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