Top 100 Trevor Noah Quotes
#1. During my New York run, I injured my voice badly. I was getting increasingly hoarse, and it finally gave up. The doctor said I had two choices. Either cancel things, or try my luck and perhaps never speak again. That's not much of a choice.
Trevor Noah
#2. Revenge truly is sweet. It takes you to a dark place, but, man, it satisfies a thirst. Then
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#3. The older you get, the more you start to realize that you can't win an argument in a relationship. You can't win a fight with your woman. Because if you lose, you lose. And if you win, you lose.
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#4. He just never understood how white people could be racist in South Africa. "Africa is full of black people," he would say. "So why would you come all the way to Africa if you hate black people? If you hate black people so much, why did you move into their house?" To him it was insane. Because
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#5. My grandmother lived in Orlando East. She had a two-room house. Not a two-bedroom house. A two-room house. There was a bedroom, and then there was basically a living room/kitchen/everything-else room. Some might say we lived like poor people. I prefer "open plan.
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#6. By making the choice to leave, you're insulting the place that raised you, and made you, and never turned you away. And that place fights you back.
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#7. My ideal setting is I walk from the streets, backstage, and straight onto the stage. Two minutes, and I am on the stage. That way, in my head I have gone from my world and then into a social setting with my friends.
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#8. Comedy is a great tool. We [comics] are trying to find ways to use humor to enlighten people without preaching to them.
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#9. Black people's dogs don't play fetch; you don't throw anything to a black person's dog unless it's food. So
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#10. In America the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.
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#11. Nobody owns comedy. Nobody owns a premise. Nobody owns an idea.
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#12. We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.
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#13. Comedy is really getting quite popular in South Africa.
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#14. Catholic school is similar to apartheid in that it's ruthlessly authoritarian, and its authority rests on a bunch of rules that don't make any sense.
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#15. I know that I cannot change the entire world, but I've always believed I can at least affect change in my world.
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#16. Trevor, remember a man is not determined by how much he earns. You can still be a man of the house and earn less than your woman. Being a man is not what you have, it's who you are. Being more of a man doesn't mean your woman has to be less than you.
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#17. In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.
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#18. What I've always said about comedy is if you do it in the right way, you can say anything to anybody because they know where you're coming from. They know it's not malicious.
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#19. I'm a quarterback. I don't need to score the touchdown. I just need to spot the pass.
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#21. I don't know how to let loose when I'm dancing to the music and the people that made the music are watching me. I've never felt so much pressure in my life.
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#22. There's more outrage on Twitter about a One Direction split or about what one band member said to another than there is about institutionalized racism and something huge.
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#23. I live in South Africa. I'm proud to live there. I've always said I want to be a comedian from South Africa in the world. I will stay in places for a bit here and there and pop into New York for a while, maybe stay in London for a year, but my home will always be South Africa. I enjoy it too much.
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#24. I'd never done Valentine's Day before. We didn't celebrate it in Catholic School. I understood Valentine's Day, as a concept. The naked baby shoots you with an arrow and you fall in love.
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#25. Most of my show is true; like, 90% of everything I say on stage is true. I just have to find the way to make it funny - that's the difficult thing.
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#26. Maybe it's because I come from a very utopian world of being a comedian, but I'm used to many live comedy performances going on in any city I'm in, and each of us is trying to be the best at what we do. I don't think of it as a competition so much as a thriving comedy economy.
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#27. As a comedian, I'm forced to have a tough skin. Until people laugh, they are detractors. You walk into a new audience where nobody knows you, they go: 'Make us laugh. Show us what you're made of. Prove why we should be listening to you.'
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#28. I'm always fascinated when people say, "We found rude conversations people had via e-mail." Why are you e-mailing this stuff? It has your signature on it! It has a time stamp!
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#29. - a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom.
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#30. Comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.
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#31. I like the anonymity, the fact that you're a stranger making strangers laugh. You aren't forcing them to laugh - it's involuntary, and that's when they give the most honest response.
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#32. That's when I realized the police were not who I thought they were. They were men first, police second.
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#33. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, "I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being." That
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#34. My mom thought having a child was going to be like having a partner, but every child is born the center of its own universe, incapable of understanding the world beyond its own wants and needs, and I was no different.
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#35. If I'm doing something on stage, and it evokes an emotion, then I might show that emotion, but I also don't believe in being a preacher. If you have a point, that's a bonus. But the funny has to come first; otherwise, you shouldn't call yourself a comedian.
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#36. I've lived many places all over the world, so I've always seen myself as a citizen of the world.
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#37. Progression, in my opinion, is often identifying shortcomings - whether it's views or the things you're doing in your life, your relationships - and trying to find the places where you improve on those.
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#38. As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate.
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#39. Comedy is crowded. There are hundreds of comedians in every place in the world.
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#40. The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don't want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.
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#41. The only authority my mother recognized was God's. God is love and the Bible is truth--everything else was up for debate. She taught me to challenge authority and question the system. The only way it backfired on her was that I constantly challenged and questioned her.
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#42. I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.
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#43. My mom used to get arrested for being with my dad. She would get fined. She would spend weekends in jail.
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#44. Regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. "What if..." "If only... " "I wonder what would have..."
You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.
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#46. In an American context, let's say gay rights or marriage policy - that's a progressive thing. I understand that in an American context.
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#47. When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that you're in. Through a comedic voice, you're talking about what needs to be talked about, whether it's race relations or politics or anything that's happening on a global or an American scale.
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#48. There's probably a goat hanging around - there's always a goat.
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#49. I live in a country where I'd say nine out of ten people know me when I walk through the streets. There's people taking pictures, there's tabloids trying to make up stories. I'm used to that. The same thing when I'm in Australia or the U.K.: I get stopped.
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#50. I would beat you, but Jesus has already exposed your lies.
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#51. I wasn't popular, but I wasn't an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself.
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#52. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that's not how people are.
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#53. My mom, through my dad, rented the apartment next door to his ... he had the lease on both places. But then, she would dress up and act like his maid ... a practical maid. No fantasies.
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#54. Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them - and that is what apartheid stole from us: time.
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#55. I don't think I have thick skin, but I heal fast. It's easy to break through, but I heal fast.
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#56. My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids.
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#57. Race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason. Humans being humans, and sex being sex, that prohibition never stopped anyone. There were mixed kids in south Africa 9 months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach at Table Bay.
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#58. I've always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I've loved playing with it. People act as though it isn't an issue, but it's a recurring theme in our lives globally.
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#59. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.
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#60. I want to be in a position where I get to start off fresh. I don't have any preconceived notion of how I should feel.
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#61. I'm not a big Hollywood guy. I don't know how the machine works. I leave that to people better than myself.
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#62. Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It's a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either love or hate them, but that's not how people are.
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#63. Don't fight the system, mock the system
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#64. I lost contact with my father for many years because of apartheid. For, like, six years, I didn't see my dad. And, now, this was the six years of being a teenager.
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#65. Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks. I
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#66. Often, people who can do, don't because they're afraid of what people that can't do will say about them doing.
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#67. There's news that happens in different spheres and can be made just as funny, but it's not necessarily in the normal news medium.
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#68. People love to say, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." What they don't say is, "And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod." That's the part of the analogy that's missing.
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#69. I've never been afraid to fall in love, nor impatient to find it.
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#70. If you laugh with somebody, then you know you share something.
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#71. If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you're a savage. If you're African and you pray to your ancestors, you're a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.
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#72. it is easier to be an insider as an outsider than to be an outsider as an insider.
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#73. We live in the Internet age. Everyone wants clicks. Clicks are what sells.
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#74. Sun'qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says "don't undermine me," "don't underestimate me," and "just try me." It's a command and a threat, all at once. It
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#75. That's who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or
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#76. I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman ... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.
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#77. Nelson Mandela was in jail when I was really young, and Winnie Mandela was one of the biggest faces of the movement. In South Africa we have a common phrase - it's like a chant in the street and at rallies: "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo." Which means, "You strike a woman, you strike a rock."
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#78. America was a thing I saw on TV - that wasn't a real world. That wasn't within my realm of dreaming.
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#79. I want my audience to be my friends - that is when they will get the best comedy. If they see me as a performer, they won't get the best show.
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#80. If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.
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#81. When I first started doing comedy, there was no such thing as a room that had black people and white people in it. That didn't exist.
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#82. I'm not an abrasive person. I do speak my mind, but my goal is never to offend. I don't intentionally want to strike a chord.
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#83. The truth is, people don't know me. When people don't know you, they're going to try to get to know you as quickly as possible, because you're now taking the place of somebody that they love dearly, or somebody that they hate sincerely, and so they need to know who you are.
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#84. I was the first in my family to board an airplane. I was the first in my family to get kicked off an airplane.
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#85. The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what is was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.
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#86. In my world, a woman was the most powerful thing that I knew. Still is. A woman made the money in my house; a woman made my food. A woman beat my ass when I wasn't a good kid. Women were behind a lot of what spurred South Africa toward democracy.
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#87. People don't want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money. With
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#88. People always lecture the poor: "Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!" But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People
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#89. That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people. I
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#90. You have two choices, two paths to take as a comedian. You can tackle the difficult subjects and be harsh about it, be brash, be abrasive. But adding hatred to racism is not going to help everybody. So I like to have fun around it.
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#91. As an outsider myself, I always mixed myself with different groups ... I've never been afraid to go into a different space and relate to those people, because I don't have a place where I belong and that means I belong everywhere.
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#92. Everything I have ever done I've done from a place of love. If I don't punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn't love you. If the police get you, the police don't love you. When I beat you, I'm trying to save you. When they beat you, they're trying to kill you.
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#93. I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them.
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#94. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.
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#95. In America, there is no racial segregation. I'm not sure I'm quite familiar with this phrase.
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#96. Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.
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#97. Our go-to source is no longer dictated by a small group of cable news outlets. We have to expand our view. Sometimes, a story is made and breaks on Twitter. We have to find a way to react to that, to consume and also disseminate the information from Twitter, which is not an easy thing to do.
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#98. A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It's like a bicycle but with emotions.
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#99. I love ebola jokes. When done in the right way, maybe it gets people to learn about ebola, to learn about the stigmas behind the identities held by Africans and so on.
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#100. It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.
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