Bill Bailey

We live in the age of entitlement, as opposed to enlightenment.

— Bill Bailey

What I'd like to do now - well, what I'd like to do now is grow my beard very long, weave it into my pubes and strum it like a harp.

— Bill Bailey

But our country's equivalent of gritty reality is more like "Look out Sarge, he's got a shooter!"

— Bill Bailey

And just as he said that a feminist jumped out of a manhole - just jumped up and oh, and she didn't like that. That she didn't like that.

— Bill Bailey

Who photographs kebabs?

— Bill Bailey

Three blokes go into a pub. Something happens. The outcome was hilarious!Episode 1, 1:36

— Bill Bailey

I am a confectionary-based existentialist.

— Bill Bailey

Nostalgia: How long's that been around?

— Bill Bailey

Aldous Huxley took the drug mescaline and then chronicled his experience in the book The Doors of Perception. Now, I don't actually think that's the first thing he wrote: he probably wrote 'my brain is melting' ten thousand times, but it was the book that the critics latched on to.

— Bill Bailey

A lot of people say there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I don't think there's a fine line, I actually think there's a yawning gulf. You see some poor bugger scuffling up the road with balloons tied to his ears, he's not going home to invent a rocket, is he?

— Bill Bailey

BB: I'm actually from the West Country...Ch. 4, 07:38

— Bill Bailey

Arbroath; it was the scariest heckle I ever had. Arbroath, I don't know if you've ever been - very very cold throughout the year, and I was pacing up and down, primarily to keep warm really, I was freezing. And this chilling voice came from the back of the room, it just said "Stand still"... [mimes holding a rifle]Ch. 4, 08:18

— Bill Bailey

The Chaucer Pubbe Gagge

— Bill Bailey

At parties, sometimes, for a laugh, I introduce myself - people say 'What do you do?' and I say 'I'm Aled Jones, its all gone wrong for me. No, look, I've still got it! (drunken bawl) I'M WALKING THROUGH THE AIIIIIIR, HAAAAAAHAHAHA.'Ch. 19, 32:55

— Bill Bailey

This is a song inspired by the work of Phil Collins; the nasty, whining little git.Ch. 36, 1:18:46

— Bill Bailey

Marijuana? It's harmless really, unless you fashion it into a club and beat somebody over the head with it.Beards' (track 12) 5:29

— Bill Bailey

It's not a beard, it's an animal I've trained to sit very still.

— Bill Bailey

Three blokes go into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability. [seems to drift off in a daydream out of disenchantment, then comes back]

— Bill Bailey

My first job was selling doors, door to door. That's a tough job isn't it? Bing Bong; Hello, can I interest you in a- oh shit you've got one already haven't you? Well never mind...

— Bill Bailey

But we won't have any genetically modified food, oooh no, we won't have any GM. Which is a shame, I think we've missed a trick there. We could develop wheat with the properties of Velcro... to catch whatever it is that's forming those crop circles! But then the spaceship would have to have the corresponding Velcro, so it's a bit of a long shot.

— Bill Bailey

[responding to scattered audience applause] Ah, lovely: the ripple, the ripple there. That's nearly the Zen clap of acceptance there, wasn't it?

— Bill Bailey

I'm a vegetarian. I'm not strict; I eat fish, and duck. Well, they're nearly fish, aren't they? They're semi-submerged a lot of the time, they spend a lot of time in the water, they're virtually fish, really. And pigs, cows, sheep, anything that lives near water, I'm not strict. I'm sort of like a post-modern vegetarian; I eat meat ironically.

— Bill Bailey

You're absolutely right, Hitler was a vegetarian. It's very unseemly to think so, but there he was. Just goes to show, vegetarianism, not always a good thing. Can in some extreme cases lead to genocide.

— Bill Bailey

Talking of white supremacist violent types, I was in America, recently... [Wild laughter and applause from audience]

— Bill Bailey

I can't ever remember ever seeing any charity porn, though. "Farmyard Frolics 3: A portion of this goes to a women's literacy programme in Eritrea".

— Bill Bailey

There's more evil in the charts than in an Al-Qaeda suggestion box.

— Bill Bailey

Anyway, beards and drugs leads me neatly to the Taliban; were they really that backward, or were they the finest minds of the fourteenth century? Nobody seems to know or care. That ideology was never going to work, was it? It was just cobbled together from different beliefs: The anti-intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge, the religious persecution of the Nazis, the enforced beard-wearing from the world of folk music, and the segregation and humiliation of women from the world of golf.

— Bill Bailey

[as George W. Bush] I will tame evil, I will get the evil ones, We must find the evil ones. We must get evil, we must laminate evil, we must wear it round our necks, at the backstage party in paradise!

— Bill Bailey

I'm English, and as such I crave disappointment. I actively seek it out.

— Bill Bailey

The reason we'd stopped was that the buffet car was on fire, that was the reason we stopped. One of the giant biscuits spontaneously combusted out of boredom. Whoever was charged with making the announcement momentarily lost all sense of procedure and we got this tantalizing glimpse into the chaos on the trains, and all we could hear was (bangs on microphone) "Gary, it's burning, what we gonna do?!" And everyone on the carriage just cheered, "Hooray! We're rubbish!"

— Bill Bailey

"God save our gracious Queen": Why would we invoke a non-specific deity to bail out these unelected spongers? [Audience wildly applauds]

— Bill Bailey

Three blind mice walk into a pub. But they are unaware of their surroundings, so to derive humour from it would be exploitative.

— Bill Bailey

Milton Keynes: Satan's lay-by.

— Bill Bailey

[Singing as U2, in Irish accent] Hello! Some old Celtic bollocks!

— Bill Bailey

Juxtaposition, you can't handle the juxtaposition!

— Bill Bailey

And the thing is, I'm amazed they went with Obama at all, you know, I mean, I thought Hilary would have been a shoo-in, but no. [Shrugs] Apparently America's got an issue with gender, not with race. Huh. So, erm...

— Bill Bailey

It's what we've always known for many years outside of Australia...You can't have a world leader called Kevin. [On Kevin Rudd]

— Bill Bailey

Is it an Oud?

— Bill Bailey

Creationists mainly are Americans who think the world was created in 1982 to coincide with the rise of Supertramp, but you can very easily dispute this by playing some of Supertramp's earlier albums.

— Bill Bailey

Or I get my navel fluff out and weave it into wigs so that fleas can act out Victorian melodramas. [On relaxation]

— Bill Bailey

James Blunt - a man who recently got voted more annoying than paper cuts.

— Bill Bailey

I was digging with a fork out of the kitchen drawer, sewing tictacs, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. After a bit I got bored and just started burying cheap spoons to baffle the archaeologists of the future. [On gardening]

— Bill Bailey

The actual quote attributed to Russell is, "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realise till you have tried to make it precise."

— Bill Bailey

Somehow the Tories have deflected the righteous anger at the bankers who we bailed out. The Tories manage to take that outrage and direct it at benefit claimants. It's genius. Evil genius.

— Bill Bailey

I'm an omnivore, although I am trying to eat less meat. I went vegetarian for about two years, then I suddenly got a craving one morning and that was it.

— Bill Bailey