Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad? I have kids! What d — Jon Stewart

"A goal of Colbert while working as a correspondent on "The Daily Show" — one of his "greatest joys" — was whether he could make Stewart laugh in the middle of a segment. [...] "I knew the piece was good if he couldnt look at me when we were at the desk together," Colbert recalls. "We did much (fewer) green screen segments then. The highlight was when we were covering the Democratic convention in 2004, and I did a piece on Obama being the son of a goat farmer and I said I was the son of an Appalachian turd miner. Jon couldnt look at me for the entire thing."

"Kurtz: So you dont, youre not confusing yourself with a quote, "real journalist"? Stewart: No. You guys are— Kurtz: Youre just making fun— Stewart: You guys are confusing yourselves with real journalists."

"If done for the right reasons, liberating a country from a despot, I dont see how thats immoral. Ah, done quickly, and then we all leave, yeah thats kind of... I mean, its so much obviously more complicated than that. Theyre literally, if he doesnt allow inspections, were bombing him — Ill allow inspections. If he doesnt allow them... on Tuesday — Ill allow them on Tuesday. If he doesnt serve fondue — alright, Ill serve fondue. I mean, theyre gonna do anything, its clear they cast their die, I mean, as hard as it is for Dick Cheney to get an erection, hes not gonna let this opportunity go by."

"Comedian Jon Stewart says political commentators are “making a mistake” focusing on former President Donald Trump’s individual contributions to eroding democracy, arguing instead that America’s institutions are vulnerable to “the idea that power is its own reward.” “I don’t know if autocracy is purely the domain of Donald Trump,” the former "Daily Show" host said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Unfortunately, the messiness of democracy is often maybe one of its greatest weak points. People generally want prosperity and security." "If a democratic system is having difficulty providing that or if its being subverted by those who want to create chaos so that they can make a more authoritarian government, thats part of it, too,” he added. “If we have identified the pressure points where the guardrails look most vulnerable, thats where we should be focusing so much of our efforts in terms of strengthening. … The encouraging thing is watching on a grassroots level, people that are really viewing it as something that they want to protect and that they want to strengthen,” Stewart said."

"What blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would fit into our… We invaded two countries, and spent trillions of dollars and thousand of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over, like, five or six different countries, all to keep Americans safe. We got to do whatever we can, we’ll torture people. We got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. Nine people, shot in a church, what about that? “Hey what are you gonna do? Crazy is crazy, right?” That’s the part that I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around."

"I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark… I find nothing incisive in his work. As for his influence, if he helped produce the hackneyed polarisation of moral liberals versus evil conservatives, then he’s partly at fault for the political stalemate in the United States."