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