Charles M. Schulz Quotes

I decide who's right and who's wrong, and go from there. But I can't just comment on an issue. I've got to take an editorial position. Too many cartoonists simply illustrate the news. Well, the readers know the news, and a cartoon that illustrates doesn't tell them a thing they don't already know. So, I formulate an opinion and draw it.

I never wanted to do political satire because it seems too surface to me.

It is more raw and unfettered and I'm more likely going into something you could call extreme cartooning. There's a lot of that in the course of 'Holy Terror.' There are interludes where there are pictures - cartoon pictures - of modern figures and they are all wordless. It's up to readers to put the words in.

Bill Maher fancies himself the reincarnation of Lenny Bruce.

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

Sometimes people say I'm a political comedian, which, actually I'm not. I'm a comedian who sometimes discusses politics, culture - again, the word 'politics' to me is just life.

Comedy has become, I think, a very important branch of public intellectualism. But it still ain't Washington.

You can go through comic strips alone and study the common man. You can trace our history.

Political cartoonists get hung up on daily deadlines and the front page. The worst thing you can do is open up the newspaper and ask, 'What's funny about this?'

Even if people hate my other movies, and hate me, or whatever, I think from this point of view, Postal is the most important movie after September 11. It's not respecting any edge, any border, any nation, any religion - it's an all-type offender. I think that only if everybody gets a little pissed about something then you will start thinking about your situation.

I think The New Yorker's cartoons aren't very political because the people who do the cartoons aren't awfully political people, and they aren't paid to be political. I think editorial cartoonists are. That's what they do. They probably have a great natural interest in politics, and then they are paid to do it, so they sort of have to hunt out these ideas. I admire editorial cartoons, but I'm also sort of happy that I don't do them because I'd hate to have to label things and I'd especially hate, more than anything, to label something Dennis Hastert or Mark Foley.

The Harvard Lampoon itself, which had a pretty stellar run in the '60s.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

Comedy has a responsibility to be a voice of society, so within that, there's always going to be those that talk about those subjects and things that are going on in the world.

I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

Good satire hopefully provides thought-provoking conversation.

Cartoons, if you ask me, are the most powerful weapon in today's politics. Balasaheb Thackeray has proved this.

The job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but a lot of my interests are in politics so I'm going to use that.

I grew up in Nagpur, and I first started enjoying the author Harishankar Parsai. He wrote mostly satire, essays on the current situation and social issues. He wrote many books and I think he was my first influence.

If you've never seen me perform live, I'm a must-see. I'm very funny. I have a different perspective sometimes on a lot of what I do and the world itself, especially America.

'The Dictator' - well, that was just a comedy, and I suppose the morality was incidental. It was just something to try and make people laugh rather than being a serious thing.

Comics are just mirrors. People can either laugh at the reflection or be disgusted by it.

The bipartisan approach filtered up through my typewriter. I used to say, "Mad takes on both sides." We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it. Mad was wide open. Bill loved it, and he was a capitalist Republican. I loved it, and I was a liberal Democrat. That went for the writers, too; they all had their own political leanings, and everybody had a voice. But the voices were mostly critical. It was social commentary, after all.

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.