Roseanne Barr is an American actress, comedian, and television producer best known for creating and starring in the hit sitcom “Roseanne.” Born in 1952, Barr rose to prominence in the 1980s with her stand-up comedy and gained further success with her eponymous sitcom, which aired from 1988 to 1997. “Roseanne” was celebrated for its realistic portrayal of a working-class American family and tackled various social issues with humor and candor. However, Barr’s career took a controversial turn in 2018 when she posted a racially charged tweet, leading to the cancellation of the revival of her show. The incident sparked widespread backlash and led to Barr’s departure from the series. Despite her contributions to television comedy, Barr’s legacy is now overshadowed by the controversy surrounding her remarks, serving as a cautionary tale about the power and consequences of social media in the modern age.
Roseanne Barr Quotes
1. “The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.”
— Roseanne Barr
2. “Half the world’s starving; the other half is trying to lose weight.”
— Roseanne Barr
3. “It’s a big culture of mind control too, MK-Ultra mind control rules in Hollywood. If you don’t know that, google it and look into it. It’s really hard for artists to find their voice in the media. It’s levels of brainwashing and mind control.”
— Roseanne Barr
4. “Everything here must be done twice as no one can do it right the first time.”
— Roseanne Barr
5. “Laugh every day as much as you can.”
— Roseanne Barr
6. “Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.”
— Roseanne Barr
7. “Women are cursed, and men are the proof.”
— Roseanne Barr
8. “I believe in equal rights for all citizens. One law for all.”
— Roseanne Barr
9. “This bugs me the worst. That’s when the husband thinks that the wife knows where everything is, huh? Like they think the uterus is a tracking device. He comes in: “Hey, Roseanne! Roseanne! Do we have any Cheetos left?” Like he can’t go over and lift up the sofa cushion himself.”
— Roseanne Barr
10. “Don’t call people names you dirty name caller you.”
— Roseanne Barr
11. “I’m on the mirror diet. You eat all your food in front of a mirror in the nude. It works pretty good, though some of the fancier restaurants don’t go for it.”
— Roseanne Barr
12. “I figure if the kids are alive at the end of the day, I’ve done my job.”
— Roseanne Barr
13. “Excuse the mess, but we live here.”
— Roseanne Barr
14. “A good man doesn’t just happen. They have to be created by us women. A guy is a lump like a doughnut.”
— Roseanne Barr
15. “I have a fierce eating disorder that has survived even bariatric surgery. I got even fatter after that! Hey, maybe fat people are just trying to get closer to others, did anybody ever that of that?!”
— Roseanne Barr
16. “I survived my childhood by birthing many separate identities to stand in for one another in times of great stress and fear.”
— Roseanne Barr
17. “Have you heard about the women who stabbed her husband 37 times? I admire her restraint.”
— Roseanne Barr
18. “I have horrible stage fright – you know how you go through the bi-polar stage fright thing? Then you go on drugs to get over the stage fright and perform, but then you’re not funny at all.”
— Roseanne Barr
19. “I thank God for creating gay men. Because if it wasn’t for them, us fat women would have no one to dance with.”
— Roseanne Barr
20. “I used to think that communing with nature was a healing, positive thing. Now, I think I’d like to commune with other things – like room service and temperature control.”
— Roseanne Barr
21. “Your body is your instrument, you play it expertly.”
— Roseanne Barr
22. “I have more money than God, but not as much as Oprah.”
— Roseanne Barr
23. “There isn’t a problem on this earth that a doughnut cannot make better.”
— Roseanne Barr
24. “A lot of times nerds are really artists listening to the beat of another drummer.”
— Roseanne Barr
25. “I will barnstorm American living rooms. Mainstream media will be unable to ignore me, but more importantly they will be unable to overlook the needs of average Americans in the run-up to the 2012 election.”
— Roseanne Barr
26. “I signed a deal with Satan because I wanted to get famous. Then I forgot I had a deal with Satan and then I got really famous.”
— Roseanne Barr
27. “I quit smoking. I feel better. I smell better. And it’s safer to drink out of old beer cans laying around the house.”
— Roseanne Barr
28. “The fact that my grown kids like to hang out with me, I mean, it just – I don’t think it really can get any better than that, I don’t think.”
— Roseanne Barr
29. “You may marry the man of your dreams, ladies, but fourteen years later you’re married to a couch that burps.”
— Roseanne Barr
30. “My best friend Linda is leaving her husband just because he is unfaithful to her. That is no reason to leave the person. I feel like after that, you should stay with them and make sure that the rest of their life is sheer hell.”
— Roseanne Barr
31. “There is no scarier chasm of darkness than the human mind.”
— Roseanne Barr
32. “Whatever helps you sleep is my opinion on the subject, and that’s what I like about the western world’s most popular religion, it has helped put so many people to sleep, although most of them permanently and without their approval.”
— Roseanne Barr
33. “I’m fat and proud of it. If someone asks me how my diet is going, I say ‘Fine – how was your lobotomy?’”
— Roseanne Barr
34. “To expect life to treat you good is foolish as hoping a bull won’t hit you because you are a vegetarian.”
— Roseanne Barr
35. “You’re only seventeen, you’re too young to have a meatloaf recipe… go get something pierced.”
— Roseanne Barr
36. “Here is my personal opinion about prostitution. If men knew how to do it, they wouldn’t have to pay for it.”
— Roseanne Barr
37. “I have five kids from three marriages. I come from a trailer park. My sister and brother are both gay. I have multiple personalities.”
— Roseanne Barr
38. “A lot of men are impotent and it’s very sad. How many of you are impotent? I see. Can’t get your arms up either?”
— Roseanne Barr
39. “I have a huge crush on President George W. Bush. I saw him at a recent fundraiser, and he’s a babe. He’s got that Ronald Reagan charm. I think he’s hot. I respect his wife, but if he wasn’t married I’d be putting on my cowboy boots and coming around.”
— Roseanne Barr
40. “My husband says, ‘Roseanne, don’t you think we ought to talk about our sexual problems?’ Like I’m gonna turn off Wheel of Fortune for that.”
— Roseanne Barr
41. “I call myself a ’domestic goddess.”
— Roseanne Barr
42. “I’m not upset about my divorce. I’m only upset that I’m not a widow.”
— Roseanne Barr
43. “Abortion is a woman’s right.”
— Roseanne Barr
44. “I try to tell people to keep having hope. It’s always what you don’t know and don’t expect that’s gonna be so great.”
— Roseanne Barr
45. “Who’s elk horn do I have to blow in order to get something to eat around here?”
— Roseanne Barr
46. “Diets are a temporary solution to a permanent problem.”
— Roseanne Barr
47. “My children love me. I’m like the mother they never had.”
— Roseanne Barr
48. “I got, like, Diane Keaton’s manager, and she was very connected; she had power. And she was like, “Your star is in tears on this comedy. Do you even notice that at all?””
— Roseanne Barr
49. “If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn’t going to be much fun.”
— Roseanne Barr
50. “I meditate so I know how to find a peaceful place within to be calm and peaceful.”
— Roseanne Barr
51. “My dad taught me swears when I was a toddler, and I saw, at a really early age, that if I shocked people, I would get approval, and it made my arms itch with glee. I got addicted to it. It became this source of power in a totally powerless life.”
— Roseanne Barr
52. “Putting measures like gay marriage on ballots for elections only hurts the gay rights cause and elects more conservative politicians.”
— Roseanne Barr
53. “I’ve never done anything for money, and that is why I got money. When you do stuff for money, you never get money.”
— Roseanne Barr
54. “Husbands are never happy. My husband asked me for more space, so I locked him out of the house.”
— Roseanne Barr
55. “You know what, when I was thin, I thought there was a fat girl trying to get out of me.”
— Roseanne Barr
56. “I didn’t know that being in a relationship meant you had to be nice. I thought it meant you had to hack away at the other person until they were beaten down and then were too afraid to leave.”
— Roseanne Barr
57. “Once you get away from wanting to get paid, you can actually say some true things.”
— Roseanne Barr
58. “As long as your abuser has you scared, you will stay in the cycle of abuse. Thinking of solutions helps you to escape.”
— Roseanne Barr
59. “Sometimes for me not throwing a tantrum is what running a marathon or swimming the English Channel must be like for others of a less-challenging emotional nature…”
— Roseanne Barr
60. “I remember performing on a punk stage with no mic in the middle of a mosh pit. My act was called “How to Be a Domestic Goddess.””
— Roseanne Barr
61. “I simply care nothing for any of your religions, as all three are fundamentally flawed, unlike the Church of Common Sense, right from the start! They call God he instead of she and all three would like to burn me at the stake for saying that!”
— Roseanne Barr
62. “A lot of people who are actors and artists who work in Hollywood come from a background of abuse, and you can make abused people very fearful and they’ll do what they’re told. Hollywood definitely has a point of view that it sells.”
— Roseanne Barr
63. “Comedy is the only hope for humanity.”
— Roseanne Barr
64. “I’m not going to vacuum ’til Sears makes one you can ride on.”
— Roseanne Barr
65. “Illiteracy is a huge problem in America. One in three adults in our country is illiterate.”
— Roseanne Barr
66. “Impeach the President and the Vice President, they are traitors to America, and so are all of their supporters. Impeach! Anyone in congress who refuses to save our union from these traitors by doing nothing needs to be recalled.”
— Roseanne Barr
67. “No government in the Middle East is innocent. Wars make the stock market go up, so no one in America is innocent either, nor anyone anywhere where capitalism reigns.”
— Roseanne Barr
68. “Everything that’s written about me has such a negative taint. It just has a life of its own, like an avalanche, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do to stop it.”
— Roseanne Barr
69. “I want to be the girl in Indiana Jones. I would love to do an adventure movie where I was saving the world. It might be cool if I used a lot of kitchen tools to fight off the enemy.”
— Roseanne Barr
70. “The basic thing is, people want to get paid, so they’ll say the things that get them paid, in entertainment or politics.”
— Roseanne Barr
71. “It’s the Night of the Living Dead. It’s scary out here.”
— Roseanne Barr
72. “I can’t have cats around me because they try to steal my energy.”
— Roseanne Barr
73. “My husband and I didn’t sign a pre-nuptial agreement. We signed a mutual suicide pact.”
— Roseanne Barr
74. “TV is a language all its own, a land of one dimensional stereotypes that destroys culture, not adds to it. TV is anti-art, a reflection of consumerism that serves the power structure. TV is about demographics.”
— Roseanne Barr
75. “I am an observant Jew! Now my secret is out.”
— Roseanne Barr
76. “US needs to fix up it’s election system so that votes are fairly counted, and the Electoral College is removed.”
— Roseanne Barr
77. “I’m funnier now because I’m braver and less full of hate, so everything is even more ridiculous than it was before.”
— Roseanne Barr
78. “Hollywood is the only place on earth that has more vampires, more undead, more resurrections than a month of Easter Sundays.”
— Roseanne Barr
79. “Somewhere within the concept of justice, the worst of the guilty must always be removed. I cannot divorce this, not completely. The people must have justice and so I want to reinstate and enshrine the blessed and holy guillotine!”
— Roseanne Barr
80. “Suddenly, people had three phone numbers but never answered their phones.”
— Roseanne Barr
81. “Any Hamas or Zionist type who tries to interfere with the labor unions and grab the money will be marched to the guillotines and subsequently beheaded. And isn’t that easier and more productive than some endless, bloody conflict? So sayeth the gospel of common sense. Happy Mother’s Day.”
— Roseanne Barr
82. “You can really learn from Donahue. I didn’t know you could be a woman in a man’s body. You go out and you can’t parallel park.”
— Roseanne Barr
83. “I think I’m hysterical. I watch myself on tape and just roar – isn’t that weird?”
— Roseanne Barr
84. “Eating cookies that you bake with your grandmother is one of the greatest social steps one must experience in order to grow up into a decent world citizen, in my opinion.”
— Roseanne Barr
85. “Pot enables you to think clearly without any fear or any limits. It’s a mind-expander, which is part of why it’s illegal and why drugs like Vicodin are legal.”
— Roseanne Barr
86. “I’m a farmer now, and it’s fantastic. My goal is to be totally self-sufficient and grow everything that I eat. There’s something about earning your dinner that’s cool.”
— Roseanne Barr
87. “Without democracy in our homes, we will never have it in the world.”
— Roseanne Barr
88. “Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.”
— Roseanne Barr
89. “Truth is available to the ears that can hear it.”
— Roseanne Barr
90. “There’s nothing like a hardship song to set my toes a-tappin.”
— Roseanne Barr
91. “Most of the books call Her a He, but I am able to ascertain what is meant, despite that semantic error…”
— Roseanne Barr
92. “ACORN is organizing to make sure the job of rebuilding New Orleans is done by the people of New Orleans and truly benefits the communities who have been hurt the most.”
— Roseanne Barr
93. “My daughter made me a Jerry Springer-watching kit, with crackers, Cheez Whiz, polyester stretch pants and a T-shirt with two fat women fighting over a skinny guy.”
— Roseanne Barr
94. “I try to do women’s-point-of-view comedy. The joke is, ‘This is what I think; there’s the truth.’ I try to think of stuff that’s real broad, but the more personal it is, the more universal it is. All my friends go through the same stuff.”
— Roseanne Barr
95. “I hold to nothing but envisioning international peace and utopia. We all have many more things in common than not.”
— Roseanne Barr
96. “I loved work and I loved pouring myself into the work, you know. It was the real life that I had trouble with.”
— Roseanne Barr
97. “My family were hitters. If you made them laugh, they didn’t hit you. My dad wouldn’t hit me if I got him with humor right between the eyes.”
— Roseanne Barr
98. “We never get sick of each other. That’s how sick we are.”
— Roseanne Barr
99. “My husband is almost as heavy as I am. We were married in adjoining churches.”
— Roseanne Barr
100. “And, you know, I liked writing humor. Well, I should say, I wanted to write seriously, but it kept turning funny.”
— Roseanne Barr
101. “The only options open for girls then were of course mother, secretary or teacher. At least that’s what we all thought and were preparing ourselves for. Now, I must say how lucky we are, as women, to live in an age where ‘Dental Hygienist’ has been added to the list.”
— Roseanne Barr
102. “Meditation state is a place of deep relaxation where you can pinpoint the things you do and to set a paradigm switch from effect to cause. So how to be a cause in your own life.”
— Roseanne Barr
103. “I have great parents, and they both taught me great things, but my formative years were boundaryless.”
— Roseanne Barr
104. “Honestly, a lot of the human etiquette I learned in life I learned from, like, thank-you notes and dating Jimmy Kimmel.”
— Roseanne Barr
105. “I avoided reality for most of my life. But once you deal with it, it’s kind of cool.”
— Roseanne Barr
106. “In order to be able to write a good joke, you have to find the truth.”
— Roseanne Barr
107. “I don’t really want to hang out with politicians. I’d rather go straight to hell, and not collect $200.”
— Roseanne Barr
108. “A lot of people in television who’ve had successful shows claim the ‘Roseanne’ show as their starting place, and I’m really proud of that.”
— Roseanne Barr
109. “I think that all comics or humorists, or whatever we are, ask questions. That’s what we’re supposed to do. But I not only ask the questions, I offer solutions.”
— Roseanne Barr
110. “In the new world every position of power evacuated by an arrested and beheaded pedophile or bankster will be filled with a grandmother who has pledged to create heaven on earth for all children, animal and humans with the stolen money we have recovered.”
— Roseanne Barr
111. “Being nuts is its own reward.”
— Roseanne Barr
112. “When I was little, that was one thing that I was told in a vision: I was going to have my own show when I grew up. And it’s going to be funny.”
— Roseanne Barr
113. “My kids were completely out of control, while I was working fifteen hours a day plus weekends. I screamed a lot, something I’m not particularly proud of, but it was that or firearms.”
— Roseanne Barr
114. “I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny.”
— Roseanne Barr
115. “I never consciously set out to talk about taboos or anything like that.”
— Roseanne Barr
116. “My hope is that gays will be running the world, because then there would be no war. Just a greater emphasis on military apparel.”
— Roseanne Barr
117. “I like it when very little children think for themselves, because they do not have access to car keys or credit cards or crack pipes, but they have some really funny lines.”
— Roseanne Barr
118. “I’m just into spirituality. I believe that in a previous life I used to be Shirley MacLaine.”
— Roseanne Barr
119. “It’s not really the job of a public servant to inspire, but to get the job that the people demand done. The Democrats think that if they have hope and are inspired, things will get better, but they actually won’t.”
— Roseanne Barr
120. “Self-esteem is the goddamn root of all evil.”
— Roseanne Barr
121. “Given enough time, and no other options, I can adjust to just about anything.”
— Roseanne Barr
122. “There isn’t any New Man. The New Man is the old man, only he whines more.”
— Roseanne Barr
123. “You must never be afraid in New York City, because then you will call bad stuff to you and you will not like it there.”
— Roseanne Barr
124. “Adults in a free country should be able to smoke a joint if they want to.”
— Roseanne Barr
125. “Eat as much as you’d like. My philosophy has always been that all women desire to be as fat as myself but just have a great fear of doing so. Because they think they won’t get any men, but you will. You’ll get more men, and better men.”
— Roseanne Barr
126. “I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.”
— Roseanne Barr
127. “Everything on this earth right now is about labor and slavery. War is the only American export left that anyone wants to buy.”
— Roseanne Barr
128. “I’m so much more famous than I am financially successful.”
— Roseanne Barr
129. “I’m a heterosexual. I don’t know why I’m like this. I was just born this way.”
— Roseanne Barr
130. “Being hated and hunted and blamed for your own suffering makes people kind of testy, nervous, and on edge, and often fundamentalist and extreme. Bombs get thrown only when people cannot honestly talk together.”
— Roseanne Barr
131. “I want to eat, cook, meet famous people and make fun of them.”
— Roseanne Barr
132. “Both the Democratic and Republican parties are bought and paid for by corporate America and cater to the needs of the highest bidder as opposed to the people they claim to represent. I cannot be bought.”
— Roseanne Barr
