1383: 19 Iconic Matt Stone & Trey Parker Quotes: South Park’s Creators on Politics, Hollywood, and Satire
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/18
Matt Stone & Trey Parker (Rolling Stone interview, 1998):
“We’re in the business of making people go, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
Matt Stone (South Park Studios online chat, May 2001):
“I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.”en.wikipedia.org(Posted during a fan Q&A, expressing Stone’s blunt distaste for both sides of the political spectrum, a quote that became famous for its clarity about their equal-opportunity offensiveness.)
Trey Parker (Television/print interview, 2004):
“People in the entertainment industry are by and large [tramp]-chasing, drug-addicted (expletive)… But they still believe they’re better than the guy in Wyoming who really loves his wife and takes care of his kids… Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they’re the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.”
Matt Stone (same 2004 interview):
“[We’re] ‘more right-wing than most people in Hollywood’… [only because] Hollywood types are so out there on the Left.”
Matt Stone (Charlie Rose Show, Sept. 2005):
“We just play devil’s advocate all the time.”
Trey Parker (Reason magazine Q&A, Amsterdam conference, Aug 2006):
“Michael Moore being an extremist is just as bad, you know, as Donald Rumsfeld… It’s like they’re the same person. It takes a fourth-grade kid to go, ‘You both remind me of each other.’ The show is saying that there is a middle ground, that most of us actually live in this middle ground, and that all you extremists are the ones who have the microphones…”
Matt Stone (Reason Q&A, 2006):
“Each of you at various points have called yourself libertarian… I think it is an apt description for me personally… But we never set out to do a libertarian show.”
Trey Parker (Reason Q&A, 2006):
“People started throwing [that] word around to describe us… and I would always say, ‘I don’t know, am I? You’ve seen my stuff.’ …I still don’t really know the answer to that question. I think I am, though.”
Matt Stone (Reason Q&A, 2006):
“I had Birkenstocks in high school. I was that guy. And I was sure that those people on the other side of the political spectrum were trying to control my life. And then I went to Boulder and got rid of my Birkenstocks immediately, because everyone else had them and I realized that these people over here want to control my life too. I guess that defines my political philosophy. If anybody’s telling me what I should do, then you’ve got to really convince me that it’s worth doing.”
Matt Stone (Reason Q&A, 2006):
“We see these people [in Hollywood] lying, cheating, whoring… They’re our friends, but seriously, they’re not people you want to listen to.”
Trey Parker (Reason Q&A, 2006):
“The religious right used to be a better alternative, [back when] the Republicans didn’t want the government to run your life, because Jesus should. That was really part of their thing: less government, more Jesus. Now it’s like, how about more government and Jesus?”
Matt Stone (Interview with The New York Times, March 2010):
“We don’t want you to come to it thinking, ‘These guys are going to bash liberals,’… It’s so much more fun for us to rip on liberals only because nobody else does it, and not because we think liberals are worse than Republicans.”
Trey Parker (Vanity Fair interview, September 2016):
“I don’t think that we came to any real answers.”vanityfair.com (When asked about South Park’s Season-19 lampooning of political correctness and “safe spaces,” Parker admitted they were still conflicted about PC culture. Even after satirizing it, they hadn’t arrived at a clear ideological stance or “answer” to the problems of campus and Internet intolerance.)
Matt Stone (Vanity Fair interview, 2016):
“We already did this Donald Trump episode… And real life is outrunning satire this year.”
Trey Parker (Interview on ABC’s 7.30 program in Australia, Feb 2017):
“It’s tricky, and it’s really tricky now because satire has become reality. We were really trying to make fun of what was going on [last season], but we couldn’t keep up. What was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up with. So we decided to just back off and let [politicians] do their comedy, and we’ll do ours.”
Trey Parker (same 7.30 interview, 2017):
“They’re already going out and doing the comedy. It’s not something you can make fun of.”
Matt Stone (same 7.30 interview, 2017):
“People say to us all the time, ‘Oh, you guys are getting all this good material,’ like we’re happy about some of this stuff that’s happening… But I don’t know if that’s true. It doesn’t feel that way.”
Trey Parker & Matt Stone (joint statement, October 2019):
“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all. […] Tune in to our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10! Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now, China?”
Trey Parker (Vanity Fair interview, September 2023):
“I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”
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