Top 65 Quotes & Sayings by Keith Olbermann

Our country is wounded and bleeding now if we don't know whether or not habeas corpus exists.

All the things that people like me supposedly don't do, I do.

Fox News is hated because they're elitists, and the worst winners television's ever seen.

At Current, television is all we do - that's our business. We don't have amusement parks I have to worry about, we don't have environmental cases against us, we don't have a series of outdoor-advertising companies.

I can't think of an instance at MSNBC where anything I said on the air was influenced by what was going on behind the scenes.

I stand up to people.

Reagan's dead, and he was a lousy President.

I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics.

As part of the process by which you hire me, you hire me. You just don't hire an hour of me to do a performance.

Even on the greatest teams, there's always one role player.

I'm a natural management guy. I had forgotten that. And I forgot how much I hate it.

I'm not an anarchist. I believe in government.

I have achieved what I wanted to achieve. I'm better off at some sort of independent place where they not only like what I produce but also trust me to be the one to produce it.

Once the Republicans get rolling, they assume they're going to win everything. They are zealots, and zealots assume the last five percent of whatever their plan is will be taken care of by their own greatness or momentum or divinity.

It's not about 'NBC is evil.' It's about that media structure - CBS, ABC, CNN, even some of the smaller operations are now multinationals, with these extraordinarily diverse holdings.

The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want.

I'm difficult for management. That's why I have the reputation because nobody challenges management.

Without humor, a sports fan is a religious fanatic. Without humor, a newscast is a terrible, depressing, unpalatable thing.

An uprising of the reasonable is our only chance.

It's such a simple thing, really. It's an awareness that the other people in the world are other people, and that you are one of them. That every time you have a chance to help somebody out, to do what's right instead of what you think you're supposed to do, you should do it.

As a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the incontrovertible truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats....When somebody asks you, sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and frightened nation; when somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abnegating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead; this advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up! Good night and good luck.

Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor - these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there's a problem.

Courage is a mutual thing.

Apparently, the people in the [George W.] Bush administration who wanted to confront me on this could not spell my name correctly. They wanted to send a series of emails thinking that perhaps MSNBC was perhaps favorable to the Bush administration. They thought that they could send me a series of questions or talking points to disprove Joe Wilson with.

Abraham Lincoln did not shoot John Wilkes Booth. Titanic did not sink a North Atlantic iceberg. And Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. These are simple historical facts intelligible to all adults, most children, and some of your more discerning domesticated animals. But not... to Bill O

A past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back....The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit....As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he [President Bush] is having it done for him, by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda - worse for our society. It's as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.

One side sticks to the facts, and the other side is close to playing with its poop.

If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart, along with blind hatred, a total disinterest in the welfare of others, and a full-flowered self-rationalizing refusal to accept the outcomes of elections, or the reality of democracy, or the narrowness of their minds and the equal narrowness of their public support.

If you're a baseball fan and you don't know what BP is, you're working in a mine without one of those helmets with the lights on it.

What would you do, sir, if terrorists were killing 45,000 people every year in this country? Well, the current health care system, the insurance companies, and those who support them are doing just that. [...] Because they die individually because of disease and not disaster, [radio host] Neal Boortz and all those who ape him approve this. Forty five thousand a year in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists?

What was the more likely cause of the Oklahoma City bombing: talk radio or Bill Clinton and Janet Renos hands-on management of Waco, the Branch Davidian compound?...Obviously, the answer is talk radio. Specifically Rush Limbaughs hate radio....Frankly, Rush, you have that blood on your hands now and you have had it for 15 years.

Fox News is worse than al Qaeda. It's as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.

Without [hatred] Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But he still says so. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida. But he still says so. And thus, gripping firmly these figments of his own imagination, Mr. Cheney lives on, in defiance, and spreads - around him and before him - darkness, like some contagion of fear. They are never wrong, and they never regret - admirable in a French torch singer, cataclysmic in an American leader.

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

A bully is fighting out of a need to dominate. And is usually unwilling to take the consequences.

You know the Art Rule: Do something that entertains/interests YOU, if you're lucky it'll do the same for others.

It's very tough to get yourself around the idea that there could be a mechanism being used or abused to restrict and alter the society in which we live.

Matt Millen, you draft a wide receiver every year. HOW DARE YOU SIR, HOW DARE YOU!

The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you're not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don't take it personally when they say 'no' - they may not be smart enough to say 'yes.'

Can Ken Starr ignore the apparent breadth of the sympathetic response to the President's speech? Facially, it finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses. If he now pursues the President of the United States, who, however flawed his apology was, came out and invoked God, family, his daughter, a political conspiracy and everything but the kitchen sink, would not there be some sort of comparison to a persecutor as opposed to a prosecutor for Mr. Starr?

[Michelle Malkin] has been supporting a party which includes most of the idiots in this country who would judge her entirely and exclusively on her [Filipino] appearance.

I just think if you're 44 years old and you're not smarter than you were when you were 35 years old or 25 years old, just stay in your room.

And if Sarah Palin whose Web site put and today scrubbed bull's-eyes targets on 20 Representatives, including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part - however tangential - in amplifying violence and violent imagery in American politics, she must be dismissed from politics. She must be repudiated by the members of her own party. And if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling. And they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party.

Good evening. A President who lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584 of our family and friends and neighbors; a President whose administration initially tried to destroy the first man to nail that lie; a President whose henchmen then ruined the career of the intelligence asset that was his wife when intelligence assets were never more essential to the viability of the Republic; a President like that has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century.

I do know without fear of contradiction what the definition of life is and it is 12 words long. 'Life is defined by how much you improve the lives of others.'

Success is overrated.

The idea of negotiating with the President of the United States runs contrary to everything that the Republicans have done since January 20, 2009.

The format of the nightly newscasts is still very much 1981 - "Tremble, onlookers! I am the anchorman and now here is a miracle: a report by satellite from many thousands of miles away. I will return to introduce another one in due course."

What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health? What more obvious role could government have than the defense of the life, of each citizen? We cannot stop every germ that seeks to harm us any more than we can stop every person who seeks to harm us. But we can try dammit and government's essential role in that effort facilitate it, reduce its cost, broaden its availability, improve my health and yours, seems, ultimately, self-explanatory.

On so many levels [S.E. Cupp]’s a perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does.

You risk becoming a parody of yourself by not innovating.

The key to terror, the key to terrorism, is not the act - but the fear of the act. That is why bin Laden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting together videotaped statements and releasing virtual infomercials with dire threats and heart-stopping warnings. But why is the Republican Party imitating them? Bin Laden puts out what amounts to a commercial of fear; The Republicans put out what is unmistakable as a commercial of fear. The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and the others broadcast into your home.

If you make a decision in your life, even one as eminently logical and self-improving as "Why'd you start washing your hair every day?" and you start getting questioned hourly about it, you're going to start second-guessing yourself.

What's the difference between a hockey mom and a mass turkey-murdering machine? Looks like about 15 feet.

[T]he strike is inherently dangerous to the rich, and to the corporations who have brought this country to her knees, because it is the only defense the ordinary citizen has.

Just a threat of a boycott has got the Russians spinning.

Your anger will cool into hardened passionate insight if you wait a day. Most of the things that make me angry I let them sit. The heat that remains will be sufficient. The stuff that evaporates is the stuff that would have simply offended or made it histrionic.

Health care is, at its core, about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death. Of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us unto eternity, extending it another year or month or second.