George Carlin

It always seemed to me that the reasons groups came together were superficial. The group didn't feed me and I had nothing to contribute to it. I had a deeper goal, this giant puzzle to work on, which was only going to happen if they left me alone. The aloneness of the stage makes groups irrelevant. Few things dramatize the face-off between loner and group more starkly than the artist before the audience. And there’s no irony here. If this loner can't get the audience to act as a group - laugh together - he’s fucked.
-George Carlin

The worst thing about groups are their values. Traditional values, American values, family values, shared values, OUR values. Just code for white middle-class prejudices and discrimination, justification for greed and hatred. I believe in giving everyone, as I encounter them one at a time, the full value of their dignity and their honor in the world. Whether I’m seen as a celebrity on an elevator or I’m just George the stranger, I open myself to them and I take them in and I give them everything I would want myself in terms of treatment, feeling and consideration. I call that a value.
-George Carlin

I had a left-wing, humanitarian, secular humanist, liberal inclination on the one hand, which implied positions on myriad issues. On the other I had prejudices and angers and hatreds towards various classes of people, none of which included skin color or ethnicity or religion. Well - religion, yes. I used to get angry at blue-collar right-wingers but that passed because I saw that in the end they were just a different sort of victim.
-George Carlin