Stephen Colbert

“Lawful good is a tunnel vision. Lawful good can cause a lot of chaos and evil by being completely unbending. So that's, I've always been very suspicious of lawful good characters.”

“And that's, I think imagination is a big part of leadership too. You have to express to the other people literally what your vision is. And that's not a metaphor. How do you actually see this happening? And then you have to take the time to accurately describe…”

“Empathy and imagination are completely, completely inseparable. And I think that's what empathy has to do with creativity is that you have to have imagination on what it is the effect of this on an audience.”

“And then really have a jaundiced eye for garbage news sites, even if they give you the setup that you want, we just don't use them on air because we know probably that's going to get fact checked into the grave by this time tomorrow. And then we won't be able …”

“Art is by humans for humans about being human. It's not about Ideas. Because ideas are constructs, and humans are not a construct. They experience ideas, and they have emotional responses to them, and I think art is that combination of an idea that, that elici…”

“Judgment might just be part of our experience, and I'm not saying that that's not a good thing for you to take as a first step, but it's like saying that the be all and end all of sex is masturbation. Yes, it's very freeing. There's no judgment. You don't feel…”

“I think this might be finger exercises for a whole new form that we haven't seen yet.”

“The work that I do is served by being factual about it because that makes it easier to write the second joke. Because if you make up something for your first joke, you got to make up something for your second joke. You know what I mean? But one joke can build …”

“I'm sorry that you get your news from me because I'm not trying to give you news. That's why I never want to break news for the audience. I want it to be things that they generally know about, or I only have to explain a little bit because it's all about, here…”

“That's the pitfall I believe that professor would have with AI. Is that you love too well the work of your own hand, and that you replace the experience of the creation with your own sub-creation.”

“So when Colbert gets Gets fired for losing forty million dollars a year. I just looked at that and I go, well, of course. Yeah. That's gonna happen to all of them. This is just not a model.”

“I believe the first reason I decided to run was because I showed up in a poll And in the poll, I was beating Joe Biden. I believe that it was the poll specifically coming up in South Carolina. And PPP, which often will just throw in, like, a cultural figure ju…”

“We wanted to be the nacho cheese Doritos Stephen Colbert campaign for president. And it turned out there was some legal problems there, and it became the nacho cheese Dorito coverage of the Stephen Colbert run for president with your host Stephen Colbert. So t…”

“We raised like a quarter of a million dollars or something for schools in South Carolina in the next month, and it was terribly exciting.”

“The Democrats won't let you on the ballot. And I know it was just a joke, but it still felt bad. And so the Democrats kicked me off. I mean, the other candidates basically got together and muscled the Democrats in South Carolina to not allow me to be on the ba…”

“One of the great joys of that show was that we didn't do anything fake. I was fake, but everything I did had to be real. I had to really run for president. I had to really testify before Congress. We had to really hold a rally. We had to really file for Federa…”

“We raised another half a million dollars for DonorsChoose to get, people on Reddit saw that we played games with DonorsChoose, and someone from Reddit came to me and said, hey, if we raise a half a million dollars for DonorsChoose, will you do an Ask Me Anythi…”