Top 160 Quotes & Sayings by Trevor Noah

I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Comedy is really getting quite popular in South Africa.

The first purpose of comedy is to make people laugh. Anything deeper is a bonus. Some comedians want to make people laugh and make them think about socially relevant issues, but comedy, by the very nature of the word, is to make people laugh. If people aren't laughing, it's not comedy. It's as simple as that.

I was doing a show at the Comedy Store which Eddie Izzard saw, and we chatted for a bit afterwards. I didn't really know he was; we just hung out as comedians together, and when he heard my story, he said, 'Why don't you tell that on stage?' I didn't really want to burden people with all that, but he said that I could have fun with it.

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.

I don't think I have thick skin, but I heal fast. It's easy to break through, but I heal fast.

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.

Africa's not a color - it's a place.

If you laugh with somebody, then you know you share something.

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.

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.

I'm not a big Hollywood guy. I don't know how the machine works. I leave that to people better than myself.

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.'

We've got so many different cultural groups in my family that I've had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people.

I've never been afraid to fall in love, nor impatient to find it.

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.

We get angry about the small things sometimes, I feel, so that we feel like we're doing something, so that we don't have to tackle the big things. And it's fine; let people do that. But I'm not gonna now change because of that. You know? Like, the worst thing that happens to me is you don't like me. And then what?

We live in the Internet age. Everyone wants clicks. Clicks are what sells.

America was a thing I saw on TV - that wasn't a real world. That wasn't within my realm of dreaming.

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.

I'm literally driving in the middle of the night, and my phone rings, and my manager says, 'How would you like to be the host of the Daily Show?' I get out the car, and I didn't have legs. You know in those movies where there's an explosion? But instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear the silence. That's literally what happened.

I was the first in my family to board an airplane. I was the first in my family to get kicked off an airplane.

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.

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.

Nobody owns comedy. Nobody owns a premise. Nobody owns an idea.

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.

I'm not a confrontational person or comedian. I think we can explore more things if one of us is not fighting with the other. I take it easy. But I do like comedians who are very different from myself: I love dry comics with deadpan one-liners. I look on and think, 'That's amazing; why didn't I think of that?'

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.

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.

I'm a quarterback. I don't need to score the touchdown. I just need to spot the pass.

If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.

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.

My mom used to get arrested for being with my dad. She would get fined. She would spend weekends in jail.

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.

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.

Language and accents govern so much of how people think about other people.

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.

I speak English, obviously, Afrikaans, which is a derivative of Dutch that we have in South Africa. And then I speak African languages. So I speak Zulu. I speak Xhosa. I speak Tswana. And I speak Tsonga. And like - so those are my languages of the core. And then I don't claim German, but I can have a conversation in it. So I'm trying to make that officially my seventh language. And then, hopefully, I can learn Spanish.

When you see someone as a human being, you begin to understand most people are doing what they believe is right. I ask myself, "What if you were wrong? How would you want someone to engage with you?"

I often feel like the woman in your life is your driving force. She's your muse. She plays a big role in determining how confident you feel when you walk out the door. She can add 1,000 kilowatts of energy - or drain that out of you. She said, "No, you're not that funny." I thought, She knows better than anyone.

I grew up in a world where authority was female. I never thought to call myself a feminist because of branding. I had this skewed idea of feminist: I thought it meant being a woman who hates men. When I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists, I was like, "Oh, this is what my mom taught me. This is simple. I don't understand why everybody is not this."

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.

I became a chameleon. My color didn't change. But I could change your perception of my color.

So what you do [under apartheid system] is you convince black people that the reason they are being oppressed is because there are some within their community who just can't behave. And if only they could behave, then everyone else would have more freedoms and liberties, which, of course, is not true.

Often, people who can do, don’t because they’re afraid of what people that can’t do will say about them doing.

If he says that, if he wins, he's going to, you know, dismantle the libel laws and come after the newspapers, I feel like we should take him at his word. This is the same man who has been writing letters to people who he's, you know, bared a grudge against for 20 years. So if Donald Trump says that, I don't know why you wouldn't want to believe him.

I think all of us should seek help, and not help is in a - you know, help shouldn't be seen as a frightening thing. Help shouldn't be seen as a weak thing.

I've come to learn as an adult that love is a hell of a drug. It's one of the most dangerous things that human beings can have. It's also one of the most beautiful things that human beings can possess because love, on one hand, gives you the ability to care for a human being sometimes more than you would care for yourself. Love, unfortunately, sometimes gives you the ability to forgive somebody and blind yourself to the truth.

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.

Comedy is a great tool. We [comics] are trying to find ways to use humor to enlighten people without preaching to them.

What the apartheid system was really good at doing was convincing groups to hate one another.

I know that I cannot change the entire world, but I've always believed I can at least affect change in my world.

If you spoke to me in 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.