QuoteLog

“We live in the same geography, but our sense of country and nation could not be more different. I don’t want my kids to grow up in their world, and they don’t want their kids to grow up in mine. It’s as simple as that. We might as well be Israelis and Palestinians. I see no compromise with the Left, only victory against them. Leftism needs to be stamped out, just as they wish for conservatism to be stamped out. Neither side will have it any other way. It’s a death struggle as far as I’m concerned.”

“The fact is that today’s ‘Republican’ Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word ‘Republican’ has always been synonymous with the word ‘responsibility,’ which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. Today’s whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion.”

“Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world. Bloggers don’t know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square — without editors, correction policies or community standards.”

“In politics as in retailing, you never argue with the customer. If the polls are accurate, the American people perceive George W. Bush as a upright and honorable man. On the other hand, they don’t much like his economic policies, and they worry that he may be too much of a risk-taker in foreign affairs. A smart political operation would work on those pre-existing weaknesses. It wouldn’t waste time trying to convince an incredulous public that the genial likeable man they see on television is in reality the reincarnation of Hitler.”

“Now it’s gone Malcolm X. It’s gone ‘by any means necessary.’ I mean, how many campaigns do you remember where Hitler has come up a lot? If I were the Hitler people, I’d be raising a stink. I think he’s gotta protect his legacy. He’s gotta come out and go, Look, all right, you guys have your flaws but, hey, I was evil, baby!”

“We’ve wandered a long way from safe ground in the news business. Sometimes I wonder if we can find our way back.”

“This must have been what it was like for the Catholic Church when movable type was invented. Until then, the Church controlled who would be the scribes.”

“This is a hard war and we, frankly, inside the Army Reserve have been not properly prepared for it.”

“If I hear one more person tell me how lousy a candidate Kerry is and how he can’t win... Dammit, of COURSE he’s a lousy candidate — he’s a Democrat, for heavens sake! That party is so pathetic, they even lose the elections they win!”

“George W. Bush unhinges people. He just does. It isn’t his fault that he’s a lighting rod for the paranoid. But that doesn’t change the fact that he is. He acquired political capital after the attacks on September 11, but now it is mostly exhausted. That makes him a liability, too.”

“I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I’m gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.”

“It used to be that only leaders could be demagogues. They were the only ones with access to mass communication, which allowed them to manipulate popular prejudices in pursuit of power. Now fast computers and the World Wide Web have democratized demagogy. Today anyone can sit at his or her terminal, spew hatred, issue false accusations and become a virtual Sen. Joe McCarthy. On both sides of the political spectrum, that is exactly what some people are doing. Last week, they found my e-mail address.”

“We are deluding ourselves if we think our blogs are themselves having a direct impact — they’re not. Instead, we have an indirect effect by pushing the media and certain opinion leaders, who in turn push the wider American public.”

“Kosovo certainly taught the world a lesson. Wherever there’s suffering, injustice, and oppression, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.”

“I think that anybody that thinks that you can hold elections in the Sunni Triangle by the end of January is really smoking something.”

“If this story were hot fudge, I would smear it all over my body and then roll around in nougat.”

“I’ve learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren’t also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.”

“I have a humble request for George W. Bush and John Kerry. Just a small thing, really, if it’s not too much trouble. Shut the hell up about Vietnam, the National Guard, Swift Boat Vets, the Department of Friggin’ Wellness, and all the rest of your stupid bullshit and tell me what you think about Iran. (If you can find the time.)”

“The politicians who stand in the wells of Congress in support of a constitutional amendment are calling on their colleagues to ‘protect’ our flag from those who would damage or destroy it in the name of protest. For them, the disrespect embodied in such acts, and the dissent therein, represents such a danger that the only response is to forever silence such behavior by tailoring the Constitution to limit the rights it enshrines. I disagree. It is not our flag that needs protecting. What needs protecting are the principles our flag represents.”

“Let’s look at the men, not the marketing. By all means, factor in their Vietnam military service or lack thereof, but I think it’s safe to say that neither Bush’s National Guard service or Kerry’s Swift Boat adventures were their defining moments as potential leaders of the United States. Let’s stop acting like they were.”

“You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”

“I don’t know if it’s distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There’s a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that ‘this is all going to be political debates someday’ and, well, someday’s already here.”

“I am angry at the same time that the political fringes in America are taking over this election. I’m mad because they are distracting us from the real enemy, the one who struck that day, the one who killed those 2,727 whose names are being read right now, the one who turned America into his battleground; they are making us forget the real war. I’m mad because they are distracting us from the real work we should be about in this democracy. I’m mad because they are turning into America into their battleground, too.”

“What do a Russian ten year old, a poor black farmer in Darfur, an elderly pensioner in Israel, a stockbroker in New York, and a U.N. aid worker in Afghanistan have in common? In the last three years, they have all died in similar ways: Unarmed and civilian, they were murdered by a common cowardly method fueled by a fascist ideology.”

“Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? Why don’t you do that? You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child-killers?”

“Self-cure starts with self-realisation and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture.”

“Should George W. Bush win this election, it will give him the distinction of being the first occupant of the White House to have survived naming Dick Cheney to a post in his administration. The Cheney jinx first manifested itself at the presidential level back in 1969, when Richard Nixon appointed him to his first job in the executive branch. It surfaced again in 1975, when Gerald Ford made Cheney his chief of staff and then — with Cheney’s help — lost the 1976 election. George H.W. Bush, having named Cheney secretary of defense, was defeated for re-election in 1992. The ever-canny Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president since Eisenhower who managed to serve two full terms. He is also the only one not to have appointed Dick Cheney to office.”

“We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten.”

“I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn’t whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that’s still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you’re giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use.”

“We can’t call those who take schoolchildren as hostages our own. We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image. We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.”

“America will soon have to face the fact that while we were hypnotized over Kerry’s medals and George Bush’s National Guard service, Iran quietly and methodically created and hid away enough bombs to threaten the world’s oil supply and much of the West itself.”

“[Falcons] Kicker Jay Feely missed field goal tries of 40 and 45 yards. Both went right. Very little else did.”

“Even though I am a well-recognized liberal on many issues confronting our society today, I find it ironic that many human rights advocates and outspoken members of my own entertainment community are often on the front lines to protest repression, for which I applaud them but they are usually the first ones to oppose any use of force to take care of these horrors that they catalogue repeatedly.”

“I’m really almost embarrassed by the idea ... that I’m going to be getting tax cuts so that my 6-year-old ... grandchildren can pay bigger taxes in the future.”

“Users don’t like websites that patronize them or tell them what to do.”

“I remember, before I got married, I used to say, ‘I’m never going to take my kids to a Disney film.’ And that’s the statement of an ignorant person who hasn’t had kids yet, because if you have kids, that’s one thing you’re going to do.”

“…in a building that served as Mr Sadr’s Sharia court, just behind the shrine, police stumbled upon some of his army’s apparent victims. The Guardian counted 20 corpses — stinking, blackened and disfigured, on the floor beneath a judicial clock. It appeared they had been tortured. Given the state of the bodies, nobody could be sure.”