Stephen Colbert Quotes

I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

You see, we're America the Beautiful, not "America Well At Least She Has A Great Personality".

I'm disappointed that my own Catholic Church has decided that capital punishment is wrong. Which is pretty hypocritical if you think about it, because they wouldn't even have a religion if it wasn't for capital punishment.

I loved George Carlin and Dean Martin. I was one of those kids who had every comedy album.

If it's called the USA Today, why is all the news from yesterday?

(Rush are) like the JD Salinger of Canadian Prog Rock

I'm an actor. I hate to blow everyone's illusions.

Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America
we continue to rise and rise, like dough, until Jesus bakes us in the fiery Afterscape of the Rapture.

When my car runs out of gas, I buy a new one. I don't want to ride around in a quitter.

So, a word to all you Femin-Idi-Amins: Stop "liberating" moms by trying to
make them join the workforce. They're already doing the job that God put
them here to do: Everything.

Take away the Big Bang and what has God done? Burned a bush and got a girl pregnant. Great, he's a high school junior.

The goal is to have fun with my friends.And that means sometimes talking about things that you care about.

I don't actually believe that the present social norm is some sort of eternal truth.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

I do my show half-hour a night four nights a week. I haven't seen my kids in 18 months, and I am losing calcium in my bones. Doctors say I should stop. I'm not going to.

Use the word 'zeitgeist' as often as possible. Ideally, you want to find words that sound familiar but people don't really know their definitions: 'zeitgeist,' 'bildungsroman,' 'doppelganger' - better yet, anything Latin. But avoid 'paradigm.' It's so 1994. If you say the word 'paradigm,' everybody knows you're a poser.

I have two last pieces of advice. First, being pre-approved for a credit card does not mean you have to apply for it. And lastly, the best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show. It pays well, the hours are good, and you are famous. And eventually some very nice people will give you a doctorate in fine arts for doing jack squat.

To sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush ... I feel like I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You now what, I'm a pretty sound sleeper, that may not be enough ... Somebody shoot me in the face.

If anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Someone from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail.

My character is self-important, poorly informed, well-intentioned but an idiot, ... So we said, `Let's give him a promotion.

News for the godless: religion is inescapable. there has never been a human society without some form of worship. And don't point to communist societies like the Soviet Union - they worshipped blue jeans.

In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.

The skinnification of America's jeanscape has gone too far.

It's the way our founding fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country.

If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself.

I'm just very interested in what my guests have to say. You have to be vigilant to stay ignorant.

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It's sort of a blog for people with attention spans.

Why would we go to war on women? They don't have any oil.

There's nothing American tourists like more than the things they can get at home.

'Sympathy for the Devil' is just another way of saying 'Compassionate Conservative'.

Divorce is marital welfare.It's just couples asking society to bail them out because they didn't do enough research before they got married.

Everything in nature has found a niche, a perfect harmony of balance. Man need to find his niche, his perfect balance, where he fits in the natural cycle

It's back to school time. or as home-schoolers call it, stay-where-you-are time.

I hold a little fundraiser every day. Its called going to work.

If we raise taxes on corporations, what incentive will they have to make money other than the fact that it's the sole reason they exist.

I must confess that I've never trusted the Web. I've always seen it as a coward's tool. Where does it live? How do you hold it personally responsible? Can you put a distributed network of fiber-optic cable "on notice"? And is it male or female? In other words, can I challenge it to a fight?

The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.

If I had one wish, it would be for self-drying pants. Wait
no! Unlimited wishes! How do I return these stupid pants?!

New study reveals men like to cuddle. Another study reveals men will say anything to get into bed with a woman.

Corporations have free speech, but they can't speak like you and me. They don't have mouths or hands ...

The lead singer of Creed says he won't endorse President Obama. Well that settles it
Obama will not win the 1998 presidential election.

The pistachio: it's just like our politics. When the two sides are divided, that's when the nuts come out.

Of the over 100,000 wildfires that happen in the U.S. each year, not a single one would get started without the fire triangle: Oxygen, heat and fuel. Fire needs all three to exist. It's like the three branches of our government: Legislative, judicial and executive. The fewer there are, the safer we are.

If you're injecting fear into other people, then you're trying to kill their minds. You're trying to get them to stop thinking.

All Dogs Go To Heaven? Sorry, kids. It's only the dogs who've accepted Christ.

You cannot correct an old person every time they say something offensive. You would never make it through Thanksgiving dinner!

Well China, you got us. Phelps was doping - and he still beat you. He smoked the sticky-icky, and then he smoked your ass!

I don't perceive my role as a newsman at all. I'm a comedian from stem to stern. You can cut me open and count the rings of jokes.

Football is American; why are the Romans numering our bowls?!

The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news 'at' you.

I like the fact of John McCain's head being severed. Like that it will fit so much more nicely up George Bush's butt!

Sorry to disappoint the liberals who tuned in tonight to gloat about Obama's lead in every poll, but I am not worried. McCain may be behind, but the man is a fighter. He doesn't know the meaning of the word 'quit.' He used to, but it was stored in the same part of his brain that remembered to vet his running mate.

Thanksgiving is a magical time of year when families across the country join together to raise America's obesity statistics. Personally, I love Thanksgiving traditions: watching football, making pumpkin pie, and saying the magic phrase that sends your aunt storming out of the dining room to sit in her car.

It's August, which means Congress is on recess and Mitch McConnell has shimmied back into the ocean to seek a mate.

I'm obviously younger, much better looking [then Jeorge W.Bush].He didn't veto things, he didn't bring order and fiscal restraint.

To all the worryworts out there who said super PACs were going to lead to a cabal of billionaires secretly buying democracy: wrong! They are publicly buying democracy.

North Korea is willing to go to any lengths for the whole world to honor its demands of 'Ooh, please pay attention to us.'

Unfortunately, most of today's women resemble bowerbirds that force
suitors to build elaborate nests of twigs, leaves, and discarded garbage before choosing a mate. Any male who doesn't meet her standards doesn't get to mate that year; one assumes he just stays in his bower, reads bower manuals, and watches bowerbird porn.

As Shakespeare said, there's nothin' cooler than droppin' the 'g's off of gerunds!

Brb, ttyl ok? wow, i saved a 'ton' of time with those acronyms.

Look, PETA! If God hadn't wanted us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them so darn tasty!

The cost of living keeps going up, although death is surprisingly affordable.

If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.

Republicans will need to work hard to capture the Latino vote instead of their current strategy of capturing Latinos.

I don't like books, they're all fact, no heart.

Last night, we did the Threatdown
God, it's hard to even talk about this
and for the first time, I didn't mention bears. It's winter, they're asleep, I didn't think it would be a problem. But today I see this in the Toronto Globe and Mail
apparently a 700-pound polar bear showed up at a children's hockey game. I've said this before, they're after our kids
they're tender, juicy, you don't even have to throw away the bones.

Everybody loves dogs. They're the pizza of the animal kingdom.

The first time I met Jon Stewart was at the press conference that Comedy Central held to announce Jon would be the new host of 'The Daily Show,' which back then was not called 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.'

History moves fast. It's hard to believe that gay Americans achieved full constitutional personhood just five years after corporations did!

Let freedom ka-ching ... Corporations do everything people do except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River.

Look, I've got nothing against brains. Some of my best friends have them.

Pissing off PETA is as easy as pie. Delicious kitten pie.

I've said it before: equations are the devil's sentences. The worst one is that quadratic equation, an infernal salad of numbers, letters, and symbols.

There once was a man name Barack,
Whose re-election came as a shock.
He raised the taxes I pay,
And then turned marriage gay.
And now he's coming after your glock.

In God's eyes all children are beautiful but here on earth we have higher standards.

I did learn something interesting [while at the Atlanta airport]. You have to be a member of the TSA in order to legally perform a cavity search. My apologies to the staff of Cinnabon, but you guys should really keep that extra frosting where the customers can find it.

Why even dictate?
Well, like a lot of other dictators, there's one man's opinion I value above all others. Mine.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

The only thing that gets me high is the musky scent of my enemy's fear

When I got to 'The Daily Show,' they asked me to have a political opinion. It turned out that I had one, but I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices.

If Germans are happy it means everyone else is miserable.

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

I love the earth. If you ask me it's the greatest planet in the world.

If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government's been hiding.

If I had a dime for everytime that I was wrong, I'd be broke.

You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.

I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.

It's no surprise I am addicted to all the Republican presidential candidates. They are like crack
in that they will devastate black communities.

Am I proud of being straight? No. You know why? Because if I start acting proud, that's going to make me seem kind of gay.

I love the truth. It's the facts I'm not a fan of.

All weather is sin-related. Lust causes thunder, anger causes fog, and you don't want to know what causes dew.

Scientists have invented a new strain of cannabis without the high. They celebrated with non-alcoholic beer and furious dry-humping.

You shouldn't listen to us at all if you're looking for information. We don't take ourselves seriously on any level; we're just comedians.

Thirty seconds is the exact amount of time Americans can tolerate something they don't understand.

Democrats lead in all the polls by at least ten points, except one.. Fox News. That is with a margin of error of plus or minus the facts.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

Writing and producing the show is an intellectual process. Performing the show is far more athletic and intuitive, because you don't get to do it twice. It helps if you've done whatever the old saw is, 10,000 hours of it. Because I've done 10,000 hours of comedy, I have this database in my mind of what works and what doesn't work.

I won't be doing the new show in character, so we'll all get to find out how much of him was me. I'm looking forward to it.

We all deserve credit for this new surveillance state that we live in because we the people voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans alike ... We voted for the people who voted for it, and then voted for the people who reauthorized it, then voted for the people who re-re-authorize d it.

Liberals want to burn the flag, but progressives just want to microwave it?