My character is self-important, poorly informed, well-intentioned but an idiot. So we said, `Let's give him a promotion.'
Stephen ColbertRead
Let freedom ka-ching...Corporations do everything people do except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River.
Interpretation
The quote critiques corporate power and its impact on freedom and the environment.
Stephen Colbert's quote highlights the contradiction in how corporations operate with immense freedom while often evading responsibility for their actions, particularly in relation to environmental harm. It suggests that despite their human-like capabilities, corporations lack accountability for damaging actions that affect the society and environment, making a poignant statement about the freedom that enables this behavior.
In practice
In a discussion about corporate responsibility at a conference.
My character is self-important, poorly informed, well-intentioned but an idiot. So we said, `Let's give him a promotion.'
Luckily, a recent survey published in the American Sociological Review revealed that atheists are the least trusted group in America—less trusted, even, than homosexuals. It makes sense at least we trust the homosexuals with our hair.
And when those bombs went off, there were runners who, after finishing a marathon, kept running for another two miles to the hospital to donate blood. So, here's what I know - these maniacs may have tried to make life bad for the people of Boston, but all they can ever do, is show just how good those people are.
My father always wanted to be 'Col-bear.' He lived in the same town as his father, and his father didn't like the idea of the name with the French pronunciation. So my father said to us, 'Do what you want. You're not going to offend anybody.' And he was dead long before I made my decision.
I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.
And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness. Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the 'wordanistas' over at Websters, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word!' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen.
There have been men before who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself, as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.
Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations.
I do not know how to make a man think seriously about sin and judgment, and must look to the work of the Holy Spirit for any hint of such a working.
Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.
We have international standards regulating everything from t-shirts to toys to tomatoes. There are international regulations for furniture. That means there are common standards for the global trade in armchairs but not the global trade in arms.
People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.
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