Richard Lewis Quotes

I love Hanukkah because it's so weird. You just sit there and light candles and say spells.

Is it possible Hanukkah doesn't inspire folksy songs? Plot lines may be a part. The Christmas story has a lot of material to work with. There's Jesus and his birth, the wise men, their gifts and tons of frankincense.

I felt a real strong connection and still do with Hanukkah. So it started out by doing concerts on Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights tour, and then, yeah, let's make some Hanukkah songs. Let me make a Hanukkah song that kids can listen to, party to and get the spirituality of it, because it is not just about dreidels and having fun.

Hanukkah is...the festival of lights, instead of one day of presents, we get eight crazy nights

In terms of my religious preference, if a year goes by and I don't have a Seder or I don't light the menorah, I feel a loss.

The West has the wrong perception about Turkey itself.

If Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican first name?

What I find fascinating about Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights we celebrate at this time of the year, is the way its story was transformed by time.

Americans know as much about Canada as straight people do about gays. Americans arrive at the border with skis in July, and straight people think that being gay is just a phase. A very long phase.

Given the fact that most religions share basic values, it is most unfortunate that religious people can be played off against each other so easily. One possible reason for this may be that people do not know enough about other people's beliefs.

I said that when I looked at photographs of the firefighters who went into the Twin Towers, their faces looked to me like Irish faces. I hadn't yet learnt how careful outsiders have to be when talking about race in America, and I'd put my foot in it. Someone stood up and said aggressively, 'What do you mean by Irish faces?'

I've only been to these foreign countries: Canada, L.A. and Miami.

Like most reasonable people, it saddens me when I see Americans celebrating a heritage they don't understand.

Even as a little kid I knew that spinning a dreidel on the floor for literal pennies was a sad consolation for the joys of trimming a Christmas tree.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

I'm not against the Hanukkah songs. I like Hanukkah songs. I grew up with Hanukkah songs. I'm not opposed to Hanukkah or the songs that accompany it, at all.

Put on your yarmulkahHere comes HannukahSo much funnukahTo celebrate Hannukah

After I decided to become a Jew, only then did I learn that the Jews don't have all the money. When I found out Rockefeller and Ford were goyim, I almost resigned.

On this lovely, lovely Hanukkah, drink your gin and tonica.

Everyone thinks I'm Jewish. I'm not. Last year I got a call: "Happy Hanukkah." I said "Ma, I'm not Jewish."

If you hear a man rail at the Bible, you can usually conclude that he never reads it.

Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.

Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.

Those people upstairs think that Karl Marx was somebody who wrote a good anti-trust law.

At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven't called walking for 20 years, now you don't know what it is. When you call walking, you're about half right.