"Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I… I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it. Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize."
Jon Stewart is an American comedian, writer, producer, director, political commentator, actor, and television host. Stewart is known as the host of the satirical news program The Daily Show on Comedy Central from 1999 to 2015 and part-time since 2024. He hosted The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+ from 2021 to 2023. Stewart has received numerous accolades, including 24 Primetime Emmy Awards,
"Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad? I have kids! What do you think? "Yeah, I dont want them to have any kind of a -- I want things to corrode to the point where were all living in huts." [...] [I] "like things to go a little wrong" like birdshot to the face of a guy that would survive, not "like things to go wrong" till its like Mad Max, every-man-for-himself-lets-all-ride-around-and-machine-guns, which seems to be the way that its [going]."
"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."
"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."