Stephen Colbert Quotations

Northwestern's alumni list is truly impressive. This university has graduated best-selling authors, Olympians, presidential candidates, Grammy winners, Peabody winners, Emmy winners, and that's just me!

I can't prove it, but I can say it.

Isn't an agnostic just an atheist without balls?

I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I'd go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I'd listen to 'Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow... Right!' and 'Wonderfulness,' which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I'd flip them over, 'cause it was the old stackable turntable.

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

I used to make up stuff in my bio all the time, that I used to be a professional ice-skater and stuff like that. I found it so inspirational. Why not make myself cooler than I am?

I don't accept the status quo. I do accept Visa, MasterCard, or American Express.

Thankfully, dreams can change. If we'd all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses.

I not only loved studying theater, I loved being a theater major. It gave me an excuse to brood, to grow a beard, to wear black 'at' people. I didn't just want to play Hamlet, I wanted to be Hamlet.

I'm a satirist, so I've got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I'm not an assassin. If that ever happens, it's only because something happened during the interview that got me going, and then I had to translate my feelings to the mouth of the character.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

I believe gender is a spectrum, and I fall somewhere between Channing Tatum and Winnie the Pooh.

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.'

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

I have a mug that actually verifies that I'm the world's best dad. That's a mug. That's not me talking. You can't just buy those.

The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase “He was visited by grief,” because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.

Shamelessness is a wonderful part of the character.

There's nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell.

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 am highly variable in my devotion. From a doctrinal point of view or a dogmatic point of view or a strictly Catholic adherent point of view, I'm first to say that I talk a good game, but I don't know how good I am about it in practice.

I've been accused of being unambitious, but what I do takes up every minute. I'm executive producer, I'm a writer and the host.

In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.

I heard that after you throw away a 'New York Times,' it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.

Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy.

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness: a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say 'no.' But saying 'yes' begins things. Saying 'yes' is how things grow.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm a simple man with a simple mind. I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states.

That's my parenting style - 'Go watch the TV.' I'm one of 11 children, and my mother's parenting style was, 'There's the TV. Go watch it. Mommy's got 10 other people to take care of.'

There's a degree of narcissism involved in anything in show business. I mean, you can't do it without a healthy ego. Why would you want anybody to listen to you?

If I had free time to go to Los Angeles to shoot a movie, I would rather spend it with my kids.

We have this idea in our minds that there's this separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing. And we extend that to our politics - not just church and state, but it's also there's a separation of religion and politics. But of course there isn't.

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.

We are thrilled that Jon Batiste is joining 'The Late Show' family of products. For my money, nobody plays like Jon Batiste. And you can trust me, because it is my money.

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.

I just think Rosa Parks was overrated. Last time I checked, she got famous for breaking the law.

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

I'm not here to affect you politically or socially. I'm here to make you laugh. I use the news as the palette for my jokes.

All I can do is today and tomorrow and have some idea of what we're doing next week. That's all I can worry about.

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

What the right-wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press.

My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.

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

I love being onstage. I love the relationship with the audience. I love the letting go, the sense of discovery, the improvising.

I'm a huge news junkie. I love what the news does.

My mom kind of led me toward acting. She wanted to be an actress when she was younger. That made me interested in it when I was a kid, because she and I are very close.

I'm a junkie for exhaustion, and I'm a junkie for setting up my expectations too high and then trying to meet them.

Don't be afraid to make things up. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up all the time. They're qualified to.

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.

I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.

The letters that say 'I'm getting the messages you're sending me through the television screen' are not great. But those are few and far between, thank God. I get wonderful letters, and people send me artwork.

I look, absolutely, like I'm going to sell you insurance.

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

I'm not just a pundit - I'm a comedian.

I'm very comfortable with uncomfortable situations, and I think that can seem odd to people, that I like the thrill of discomfort.

My favorite off-camera memory of Jon Stewart is watching him jump from the second level of a tuna tower into the waters off Grand Cayman.

Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers?

I do love my country. I don't think I'm particularly a good American. I don't know what makes a good American. Other than somebody who - I like people who let other people alone. I think that's a pretty good American. And I keep my hands to myself. So I'm an OK American.

I have a morality. I don't know if it's the best morality. And I do like thinking. If people perceive that as a moral intellectualism, that's fine. That's up to them to decide.

I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted 'The Munsters.'

I like being boring to a certain extent. I don't have to be flashy. I get to put all of that into a show, and when it's over, I don't have to be that.

I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing, to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone. I like getting on elevators and singing too loudly in that small space. The feeling you feel is almost like a vapor. The discomfort and the wishing that it would end that comes around you.

I love 'Sunday in the Park with George.' I saw that when I was just, just starting theater school, and I remember singing 'Finishing the Hat' or at least reading the lyrics to 'Finishing the Hat' and other songs from 'Sunday in the Park with George' to my mom to try to explain why I wanted to be an artist.

I started as a straight actor. I'd go onstage, and I'd think, 'Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene; I don't care - I'll do it again.'

I started off at the Second City in Chicago... It's an improvisational theater that ostensibly does social and political satire, but when I was there, we generally didn't. We did character work, and we did just the silliest things we could think of. We weren't all that concerned with, you know, changing the world through mime.

I would say laughter is the best medicine. But it's more than that. It's an entire regime of antibiotics and steroids.

If you don't give power to the words that people throw at you to hurt you, they don't hurt you anymore. And you actually have power over those people.

Late-night shows are 'Chopped.' Who are your guests tonight? Your guests tonight are veal tongue, coffee grounds and gummy bears. There, make a show ... Make an appetizer that appeals to millions of people. That's what I like. How could you possibly do it? Oh, you bring in your own flavors. Your own house band is another flavor.

Make no mistake: I love women. I'm married to one, I was birthed by one, and I played one in my high school production of 'Romeo and Juliet.' No one else could fit into the bodice.

My father always wanted to be 'Col-bear.' He lived in the same town as his father, and his father didn't like the idea of the name with the French pronunciation. So my father said to us, 'Do what you want. You're not going to offend anybody.' And he was dead long before I made my decision.

Simply being a guest on David Letterman's show has been a highlight of my career. I never dreamed that I would follow in his footsteps, though everyone in late night follows Dave's lead. I'm thrilled and grateful that CBS chose me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go grind a gap in my front teeth.

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.'

The only thing that I don't like is my kids watching comedy that isn't actually funny. There's a lot of supposed tween comedy on TV that isn't particularly funny, but it's got a lot of laugh track. And I go, 'Please don't watch that. Please just watch something that's actually funny.'

The summer movies are coming out. My advice: just stay home and burn a good book.

You gotta learn to love when you're failing.... The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you. Fear is the mind killer.

We're going to deal with truth on my show.

Lemme just talk to you for a second about something that I think is good for America: caramel apples, ... I had one last night. Delicious. Not talking about candy apples. I think candy apples are a danger! You crack 'em, they're very sharp. You candy apple crowd need to wake up!

Bush has a real problem on his hands here, John: What honor should he bestow on Karl Rove?

I don't trust books. They're all fact and no heart.

He would be just as apprehensive as I was, before the first film came out. Really, really, really hoping - excited, obviously - but really, really hoping that they don't blow it.

He's definitely the king, ... I have trouble watching his show. It's exhausting.

Jon would never talk about Britney's baby, ... But I see it as an example of our Hollywood limousine liberals dropping the ball on family values. Coming from South Carolina ... we don't knock up our pop stars.

Jon's his own guy, but it's a gig that says a lot about who you are in the comedy community.

I want to thank Comedy Central for picking up the show, but more importantly I want to congratulate Comedy Central for picking up the show,

I think O'Reilly could be so evolved, he's one of the X-Men

My character is not based on (Bill) O'Reilly, ... It's the same guy from The Daily Show. You'd never say it's O'Reilly.

When emotion or glitz is pumped into something that doesn't need it, it's just funny to me, ... Oh, it's not dramatic enough?

We don't want any filter, ... The correspondent is only going to put his spin on it.

Every day, if I could find someone to play with me. If I couldn't find someone to play with me, I would work on my player character.

These shows are the demon children of the 24-hour cable-news cycle,

The show is about me in that when you give opinions, you're saying something about yourself,

They thought it was warping their children's minds. Which it might have been, but it also took a lot of creativity to play it.

They're all cult of personality, ... People don't come there for news. They come there for that guy's take on it. It's an editorial. Aaron Brown loves the sound of his voice. He sucks the flavor out of every sentence.

as natural as a gorilla beating his chest.

It's about bluster and personality, ... Daily Show.

It was, actually. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons the first week it was introduced to the market - at least the first week it was introduced down here.

Smoking pot ... thanks for putting down the pipe and talking to me.