Quotes from Stephen Colbert

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 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.

Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done, except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Life is an improvisation. You have no idea what's going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

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

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

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.

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.

Cynics always say no. Saying yes leads to knowledge. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

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.

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!

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 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.

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