Jon Stewart Quotes

I don't want to sound like the old guy, but cynicism is a potential danger. It colors our way of looking at the world.

He who knows all things and believes nothing is damned.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.

In Washington, excessive cynicism is the most prevalent form of naivete. I just wish reporters were as skeptical about bad news as they are about good news.

Don't confuse my point of view with cynicism. The real cynics are the ones who tell you that everything's gonna be all right.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

Conventional wisdom is not always wrong.

Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre [journalists]

Do not believe just because you want to believe.

It's some weird idea to think that you've always got to say everything is great and perfect.

Those who know nothing must believe everything.

The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

[Faith] is nothing more than wishful thinking, and the wish is no evidence of anything beyond itself. Yet so many religious people take their wishes for reality.

But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

O star-eyed Science, hast thou wander'd there, To waft us home the message of despair?

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it." "Are you saying we shouldn't hope?" "I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!

As I say, it never ceases to amaze me how gullible some of our Church members are.

Skepticism is slow suicide.

In the first place, you shouldn't believe in promises. The world is full of them: the promises of riches, of eternal salvation, of infinite love. Some people think they can promise anything, others accept whatever seems to guarantee better days ahead, as, I suspect is your case. Those who make promises they don't keep end up powerless and frustrated, and exactly the fate awaits those who believe promises.

Reason was for suckers and Presbyterians.