American Quotes

Jon Stewart is exactly the same guy he's always been, only with money. He knows that the moment he really believes he's important, the funny goes away and he becomes Bill O'Reilly, except shorter and Jewish.

I do have to say that I think that President Obama is the greatest President in the history of all of our Presidents, and that he can do no wrong in my book. So how's that for prejudice on the Democratic side?

I want you to take away the hope because that's the thing that's killing me.

I will not bond. I will not share. I refuse to nurture.

We live in a country where John Lennon takes eight bullets, Yoko Ono is walking right beside him and not one hits her. Explain that to me!

I would never do crack... I would never do a drug named after a part of my own ass, okay?

I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.

No woman can be completely happy at any one moment in time. They're always anticipating the next thing to argue or complain about.

Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list.

We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.

TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.

There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end.

The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.

Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.

Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.

Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker - as I said earlier, you can't change people's minds, but you can get them to think.

Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.

It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared - we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring - the more they cared, the harder they laughed.

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

In the area we're discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings.

I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn't get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.

I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.

I stop and look at traffic accidents. I won't hang around, but when I hear something is terrible, as bad as it is, I've gotta look at it.

I guess because the shows were activist in their own way - the marriage of my public activism and my career activism, you know - people understand me very well. They also understand there's a very strong bipartisan part in all of this.

Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make.

Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

At great, great remove sit the head of General Electric, the head of News Corp, the head of Viacom, or the head of this giant international corporation that wants these ratings.