Quotes by Trevor Noah

The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining.“Why are you crying?!”“Because Fufi loves another boy.”“So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.”Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.

In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people.

Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesnt merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.

People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn.

Dont fight the system, mock the system

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. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didnt know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me white, even though I was light brown, I just thought that they had their colors mixed up, like they hadnt learned them properly. Ah, yes, my friend. Youve confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. Youre not the first.

I know you see me as some crazy old bitch nagging at you, she said, but you forget the reason I ride you so hard and give you so much shit is because I love you. Everything I have ever done Ive done from a place of love. If I dont punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesnt love you. If the police get you, the police dont love you. When I beat you, Im trying to save you. When they beat you, theyre trying to kill you.

Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her.

Its a powerful experience, shitting. Theres 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 dont care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyonce 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. You are never more yourself than when youre taking a shit. You have that moment where you realize, This is me. This is who I am.

—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom.

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 mothers a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my fathers Swiss, from Switzerland.

The truth is, people dont know me. When people dont know you, theyre going to try to get to know you as quickly as possible, because youre 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.

Im 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 didnt have legs. You know in those movies where theres an explosion? But instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear the silence. Thats literally what happened.

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 - thats the difficult thing.

I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You dont really need a distinction between them.

When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that youre in. Through a comedic voice, youre talking about what needs to be talked about, whether its race relations or politics or anything thats happening on a global or an American scale.

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

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.