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Trevor Noah Quotes

Total quotes: 40
“In life only three things are certain: death, Adobe updates and taxes.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Death, Taxes, Adobe Updates
“People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Outsiders, Assimilation, Tribalism
“Ben Carson: for people who like Donald Trump's ideas but hate his charm and charisma. Ben Carson is like the drug free cocaine for people who don't wanna get high but just like snorting white powder.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Ben Carson, Cocaine, Donald Trump
“Donald Trump didn't invent racism. Trump didn't invent Islamophobia. And he didn't invent violence. All he did was put his name on them like he does with everything else.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Donald Trump, Violence, racism, Islamophobia, Hyperbole
“If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.”
— Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah’s apartheid comedy and how it made him Jon Stewart’s unlikely successor
Tagged: comedy, Persecution
“A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It's like a bicycle but with emotions.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Dogs, kids, Bicycles
“Race jokes are kind of like orcas: powerful and entertaining, but you put them on display in the wrong environment and people are going to get hurt, and the joke might die. Like this one just did.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Race Jokes, Orcas, Hurtful, Jokes
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Relationships, Silence, Interaction, apartheid , Time
“Hey, son, what the hell is with your haircut? Did you see a paintbrush and say ‘I want that dude's look!’?”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Bad Haircuts
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah on the Daily Show Twitter Backlash: “That Needed to Happen”
Tagged: One Direction, Twitter, Social Media, Outrage, Institutionalized Racism
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Money, Choices, Freedom, Wealth
“He really is a TV president….He loves the performance of doing things. But a lot of the time, nothing's actually being done. Essentially, Donald Trump wants to be president, but he doesn't want to do president.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Donald Trump, TV President
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Interview: South African comedian Trevor Noah on his new show, The Racist
Tagged: Race, Racialism
“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.””
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Dreams, Imagination
“The credits from the second Godfather are better than Godfather III.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Credits, Godfather
“The convention is like where someone has put down a lure, and now there's just going to be Pokémon delegates popping up everywhere. We're here trying to catch them all”
— Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah: RNC Is Like Pokémon Go & We're Here To Catch Them All
Tagged: RNC, Election 2016 Jokes, convention, Pokemon, gotta catch em all
“We’ve had this conversation, we’ve come to the same conclusion: we can progress. It is about discomfort, yes. But that’s what progress is about, it makes you uncomfortable.”
— Trevor Noah, President Obama's Transgender Bathroom Backlash: The Daily Show
“It seems that it's either pro-cop and anti-black or pro-black and anti-cop, when, in reality, you can be pro-cop and pro-black, which is what we should all be. It is what we should be aiming for.”
— Trevor Noah, July 7, 2016 - Julia Stiles
Tagged: Black Lives Matter, black lives, Matter, trevor noah, Police Brutality, Police, Justice, Movement, protest
“Nobody owns comedy. Nobody owns a premise. Nobody owns an idea.”
— Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah Has "Stolen Material," Says 'Last Comic Standing' Judge Russell Peters
Tagged: comedy, Plagiarism, Joke Theft
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Color, Race, skin color, apartheid , South Africa, chocolate, White Chocolate, dark chocolate, Milk Chocolate
“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Language, Color, Identity
“ISIS without guns is just basically a blog.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: ISIS, Guns, Blog
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Between The Laughs, South African Comedian Hopes To Educate
Tagged: South Africa, apartheid , Miscegenation, Xhosa, Switzerland
“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.””
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Cliches, Give a Man a Fish, Fishing Rod, Socialism
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah, Smooth Criminal- Interview Magazine
Tagged: comedy, Laughter, Social Justice
“Africa's not a color—it's a place.”
— Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah Sees Childhood Under Apartheid as License to Speak His Mind
Tagged: Africa, Color, Place, Race
“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.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: native american, African, Anti-White, Anti-Christian
“But the real world doesn't go away. Racism exists. People are getting hurt. And just because it's not happening to you, doesn't mean it's not happening. And at some point you have to choose; black or white, pick a side. You can try to hide from it. You can say, oh I don't take sides, but at some point, life will force you to pick a side.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: racism, Reality, Pick a Side, Black or White, Binary Thinking
“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. Race mixing proves that races can mix, and in a lot of cases want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: racism, Race Mixing, Crime, Treason
“The hood made me realise that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programmes and part-time jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: The Hood, Crime, Internship, discrimination
“Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were black—and then there was me. I was famous in my neighborhood just because of the color of my skin. I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark. ‘The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.’”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Soweto, skin color, South Africa, apartheid , Mixed Race
“I live in 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. There’s so much craziness going on—fantastic restaurants, great lifestyle—it’s fun.”
— Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah, Smooth Criminal- Interview Magazine
Tagged: South Africa, New York, London, Cosmopolitan
“Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. 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.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Nelson Mandela, Language, heart, Communication, Identity, Culture
“Maybe we need to change who gets the Nobel Peace Prize, and when. Because so many people have won the prize and they've benefitted from all of its prestige, and then they've gone on to not be peaceful. Like, maybe we should only give the Nobel Peace Prize to people after their career is over and they've passed away, right? It's at the end. We can call it the ‘Rest in Peace Prize.’ Then we know you're not gonna surprise us, you're not gonna hurt anyone. Unless someone trips on your grave.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Nobel Peace Prize, Prestige, Rest in Peace
“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. 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. ‘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.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Regret, Failure, Rejection, What If, Fear
“Let's be honest: in general men are stronger than women. That's not sexist, it's just true. If anyone is sexist, it's nature. Yeah, nature is the one who was hanging stuff out and was like: ‘OK, men, you get the big muscles and you orgasm every time you have sex. Hell, sometimes you have an orgasm just by accident! That's how easy it's gonna be for you! And for the ladies...you get to put an entire human being out of your vagina. Have a good day.’”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Gender Differences, Sexism, strength, Nature, orgasm, muscles, Vagina
“Donald Trump sees the presidency the same way he sees one of his companies: its whole purpose is to serve him and only him…the whole purpose of the Justice Department, which he thinks is not to uphold law. No, no, no, it's to do the president's bidding. The same way he probably thinks the purpose of the Energy Department is to charge his iPhone….The only thing more shocking than his autocratic view of power is his willingness to talk so openly about it. In a strange way Donald Trump is both the most honest and dishonest president of all time. I figured it out, people. He's not cinnamon Hitler, he's Abraham Nixon.”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, Hitler, Hyperbole, iPhone, Energy Department
“When you shit, as you first sit down, you’re not fully in the experience yet. You are not yet a shitting person. You’re transitioning from a person about to shit to a person who is shitting. You don’t whip out your smartphone or a newspaper right away. It takes a minute to get the first shit out of the way and get in the zone and get comfortable. Once you reach that moment, that’s when it gets really nice. It’s a powerful experience, shitting. There’s something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don’t care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyoncé shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: Shitting, Defecation, Queen of England, The Pope, Beyonce
“I fell in love with McDonald's. McDonald's, to me, tasted like America. McDonald's is America. You see it advertised and it looks amazing. You crave it. You buy it. You take your first bite, and it blows your mind. It's even better than you imagined. Then, halfway through, you realize it's not all it's cracked up to be. A few bites later, you're like, Hmm, there's a lot wrong with this. Then you're done, you miss it like crazy, and you go back for more.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Tagged: McDonald's, America, taste, Craving
“Juggling is such a white thing, as well, when you think about it. No, just the whole concept. You have so much stuff that, at some point, you are like: ‘I can't even hold all of this stuff! I'll have to throw some of it in the air!’ That's probably how juggling started. Someone was like: ‘Wow, you have three things, but you only have two hands. Would you like to share something with me?’ ‘No, no, I'll figure this out.’”
— Trevor Noah
Tagged: Anti-White, Anti-White Humor, Juggling
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