QuoteLog

“The rush to sling mud is gaining momentum, and Fahrenheit 9/11 marks the polarization of yet another form of media. One medium after another has found it profitable to turn from information to entertainment, from nuance to table-thumping.”

“I ain’t the same person I was when I bit that guy’s ear off.”

“I’ve been writing about polarization a fair bit recently, and the more I look into it, the more I think I’ll just move to Tahiti.”

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

“Ann Coulter, on the cover of Treason, has the look of a soon-to-be-ex wife who has just finished shouting.”

“If you are going to call yourself a Christian — and I don’t — then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog’s leash? How can Christians tolerate it?”

“Despite his 2000 campaign rhetoric, George Bush is a divider, not a uniter — alienating otherwise natural allies with his stands on issues such as stem-cell research, immigration, free trade, federal spending, privacy, energy policy and yes, even gay marriage. That’s why he’s stuck in a dead heat with one of the limpest dishrags the Democratic Party has nominated since the last time they drew from the poisoned well of Massachusetts.”

“The administration works closely with a network of ‘rapid response’ digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for ‘undermining support for our troops.’”

“Moore’s assumption is venality. He assumes that President Bush and his confreres are venal, that their motives are black, that they are out to do no good, only bad, and that the only choices they make in life are between greed and power. That’s inevitably a bad analysis. It’s the exact same analysis Bill Clinton’s enemies made of him. If they were wrong about Clinton, well then, Michael Moore is wrong about Bush. Life is never that simple, never that obvious, unless you’re a propagandist or one who believes propaganda.”

“I have a feeling that if we left, Iraqis would cling to democracy for about as long as J. Lo clings to a husband.”

“Iraq is now so dangerous to foreigners outside of American military bases that journalists are failing to go out and report on all the good things that are happening there.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“People called me a longshot before, and they’re calling me congresswoman now.”

“We’re a nation of pigs & we get what we deserve — Hee-Haw, Salems, & Wide Track Pontiacs.”

“It is, quite literally, a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct. This memorandum lays out the substantive law on torture and how to avoid it. It then goes on to discuss the procedural mechanisms with which torture is normally prosecuted, and techniques for avoiding those traps.”

“We will know that we have established the predicate for waging an effective intelligence war when the next time something goes wrong, it is corrected quickly, but without an orgy of groveling self-abuse. Unfortunately, by then George Tenet will likely be a distant memory indeed.”

“You can delegate authority, but you cannot delegate responsibility.”

“People have stereotypes in their heads about what Democrats are like and what Republicans are like, and they gravitate toward the party made up of people like themselves. Once they have formed an affiliation, people bend their philosophies and their perceptions of reality so they become more and more aligned with members of their political tribe.”

“Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians — wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.”

“What the hell is wrong with a culture that stuffs my e-mail with 200 Viagra offers every day, and sends Alex Kingston back to London?”

“I wish more journalists would confront stars with drug problems and ask them, ‘Don’t your fans think you’re an asshole for getting high?’”

“It’s not a good time to retire. It’s not a bad time to retire. It’s just time.”

“Do I lift, do I drive, am I bagging groceries at a very busy supermarket? No. I sit with a little pencil and if I have an idea, I write it down. It’s light work. I can do that forever.”

“And so my education has taken me pretty much as far as it could. I started out as an ambitious young woman inspired by politics and the media. I’ve ended up disenchanted with both.”

“Public embarrassment is really very liberating. You really stop caring about what people think, which is something only the elderly seem to able to accomplish with great aplomb. So I am way ahead of everybody. And those of you behind me can kiss my ass.”

“It’s the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.”

“The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.”

“Heinz Ketchup is an American treasure ... Heinz is the Ketchup Reference Standard. It’s the über-Ketchup. So please stop dissing it in a lame attempt to make Kerry look bad.”

“I’ve never been on InstaPundit. I don’t even know what that is.”

“Awareness of an impending alien attack on Earth was nil until Independence Day opened, giving viewers a first-hand look at a frighteningly realistic account of an alien invasion. The film was largely responsible for the resurgence of Apple Inc. and its Powerbook line of notebook computers, which were shown to have a devastating effect on the alien invasion fleet.”

“Art is man’s nature. Nature is God’s art.”

“The war itself has led to, rightly or wrongly, the feeling among many in the military that they’re not receiving competent direction, that it is too ideological, and that a lot of their military efforts have been wasted by what they regard as poor, inept planning for the stability phase.”

“Stories, like plants, die if they are not tended. So do the reputations of newspapers.”

“Committees and org-chart hierarchies never add in the way of improvement, flinging subjective taste and private agendas in the way of clarity at every turn. People sometimes ask me how to improve the design work that comes out of large organizations, and I inevitably answer, ‘You can’t.’”

“I was in New York on 9-11 when the towers came down. I lived 14 blocks from the twin towers. And when they came down, I thought that the world had ended. And I remember walking around in a daze for weeks. And mayor Guliani had said to the city, ‘You’ve got to get back to normal. We’ve got to show that things can change and get back to what they were.’ And one day I was coming out of my building, and on my stoop, was a man who was crouched over, and he appeared to be in deep thought. And as I got closer to him I realized, he was playing with himself. And that’s when I thought, ‘You know what, we’re gonna be OK.’”