Keith Olbermann famous quotes

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.'
-- Keith Olbermann

#Jobs #Smart #People

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

#Fighting #Bully #Needs

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Waiting #Passionate #Stuff

Anything that prevents you from taking an action or actions that might reasonably dispel legitimate anxieties. Fear is what paralyzes you.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Anxiety #Might #Action

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#People #President #United States

My last sort of crisis was about overcoming the people who were more interested in what I had done than what I was doing in the present.
-- Keith Olbermann

#People #Overcoming #Done

I don't think there are huge divergences between my personality and what they see on TV. And I think that's why I have been gainfully employed doing this. I'll always deliver what an employer wants.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Thinking #Personality #Want

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

#Perfect #Doe #Levels

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Party #Eye #Doe

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Ideas #Tough #Used

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Worry #Environmental #Parks

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Baseball #Light #Fans

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

#News #Television #Foxes

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

#Men #Politics #Shade

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

#People

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

#Team #Player #Roles

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?
-- Keith Olbermann

#Daughter #Apology #Glasses

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

#Years #Dare #Wide Receiver

[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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Country #Struggle #Corporations

Just a threat of a boycott has got the Russians spinning.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Gay #Spinning #Threat

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.'
-- Keith Olbermann

#Long #Definitions #Life Is

An uprising of the reasonable is our only chance.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Uprising #Chance

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Hate #Oklahoma #Blood

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 of disease and not disaster, [radio host] Neal Boortz and those who ape him in office and out, approve their deaths, all 45,000 of them - a year - in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists?
-- Keith Olbermann

#Country #Years #America

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Good Night #War #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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#War #Lying #Men

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Friday #Past #Ideas

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Simple #Thinking #People

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Health #Government #Self

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Struggle #Odds #Years

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Hair #Self #Decision

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Thinking #Years #Rooms

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

#Sports #Religious #Depressing

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Anchorman #Miracle #Return

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

#Hatred #Meat #Bags

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

#Art #Lucky #Interest

Courage is a mutual thing.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Mutual

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
-- Keith Olbermann

#Children #Animal #Simple

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Independent #Trust Me #Achieve

I'm not an anarchist. I believe in government.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Believe #Government #Anarchist

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

#Memories #Wipe #Ethics

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Nbc #Media #Cnn

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Taken #Winning #Greatness

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

#President

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#People #Together #Want

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Hours #Process #Performances

I stand up to people.
-- Keith Olbermann

#People

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

#Hate #Guy #Management

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

#Challenges #Reputation #Management

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.
-- Keith Olbermann

#Thinking #Air #Behind The Scenes