Tag Archives: Quote

Mess O’ Quote-amia

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“In my opinion, any future Defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia, or into the Middle East or Africa, should have his head examined, as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Robert Gates

“And the governor, for whatever reason, sees unions as a threat. If anything, he should see them as an ally because all the public workers in the state of Wisconsin actually make him look good.” John Erpenbach

“Political contests in this country are rarely, if ever, death matches between good and evil; the future of civilization is not at stake when we enter the voting booth. The country will survive—and even prosper—even if the other side wins the election.” Lee Hamilton

“Governments go away; people are gone. But the plays, artifacts, music and poetry remain. They tell the stories of what once was, of what used to be. What’s created for us now will speak for us when we’re gone.” Tony Brown, on proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts

The psychologist “said that, by the time that girls are teenagers, when she asks them how they felt about an…experience, they respond by telling her how they felt they looked. And she has to tell them that looking good is not a feeling.” Peggy Orenstein

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Thursday’s Child

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Oh, Claire

In an interview this week, Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) stated that she doesn’t want to pay for people who are in the emergency room because they decided to buy a motorcycle instead of purchase health insurance. Um, his name is Eric and it was just a scratch and it’s really a super-sweet scooter.

No.

Actually, dear Senator, I don’t have a clue who the people you are referring to might be. Maybe these motorcycle-purchasing reckless Americans exist in the same dimension as the Cadillac-driving welfare queens or Sharron Angle’s great spoiled, lazy masses of unemployed people who don’t want to work and prefer collecting unemployment benefits. Because, peopleofwalmart.com notwithstanding, I really believe that most Americans are nothing like these people. If they lack health insurance, it is not due to profligate spending on something else, it’s because their income is too low to afford it. The people I see every day in this country really want to work and really want to support themselves and genuinely do the best they can. Perhaps you should expand your circle of acquaintances.

And I Quote

“It was such a lovely day I thought it was a pity to get up.”  William Somerset Maugham

“I don’t have to deliver it now. Everybody saw it.” President Obama to Hilary Clinton on the way to the podium to deliver the State of the Union address.

“I have already gotten three Green Bay jerseys. I mean, I’ve only been on the ground for an hour.” President Obama, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, 26 January 2011

“I meant to say that America was a milk cow with 300 million tits. And not just social security.” Alan Simpson

“Whenever you got…trouble the best thing to do is to get a lawyer. Then you got more trouble, but at least you got a lawyer.” Chico Marx

“I think my big disappointment is the shift in priorities from an America that stands for principles to an America that stands for security.” Matthew Alexander

“One drop of ink makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.” Lord Byron

And I Quote: Protest and Change in the Arab World

“I think we [the U.S.] have a bad record at this because when you’ve had the two countries where you’ve had the freest and fairest elections would be the Palestinian Authority and in Lebanon, and in each case what we’ve done is to distance ourselves from the winners of the elections.” Graeme Bannerman

“Osama bin Laden has never looked more irrelevant than he does this week, as thousands march across the Middle East not for jihad, but for democracy, electricity, and a decent job. It’s a time for hope, not fear. America can survive having less control, as long as the Arab people have more.” Peter Beinart

Love Is All You Need

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 Love Letters

 “Come live with me and be my love, and we will some new pleasures prove /Of golden  sands, and crystal brooks, /With silver lines, and silver hooks.”  John Donne, “The Bait” 1633

“You could not…move an eyelid but it would shoot to  my heart.” John Keats

“…the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy.” John Keats

“Give up your heart to me whose whole existence hangs upon you. I am greedy of you.” John Keats

“Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, /Or bends with the remover to remove: /O no! It is an ever-fixed mark /That looks on tempests and is never shaken; /It is the star to every wandering bark.”  Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 , 1609

“I suffer in my need for you.” Graffiti on a bridge in Broad Ripple, 1996

And my favorite:

“I can neither Eat nor Sleep for Thinking of You, my Dearest Love, I never touch even pudding!” Admiral Horatio Nelson

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Saturday: Late, Late Edition

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Speak Up, I Can’t Hear You.

The State of Indiana announced this week it would be making cuts to optional services in the Medicaid program for adults. This includes chiropractics, podiatry, and dental care.

It also includes hearing aids. Which are definitely optional, if you can hear.

Proving once again, this isn’t health care, this is only-if-you’re-dying care.

Update, 21 January 2011: WFYI reported yesterday that Indiana will be covering hearing aids for adult Medicaid recipients after all. Apparently, there was a “miscommunication.” However, if you need dentures or a root canal, you will still need creativity and power tools.

I Read the News Today. (Oh, boy.)

Indianapolis retailer Don’s Guns (“I don’t like to make money! I just like to sell guns!”) has run out of high-capacity magazines for Glock pistols since last Saturday. Also, “We’re seeing a lot of young people coming into the range and practicing. Some of them are in there shooting and seeing how fast they can change clips.”

No worries, though, if you’re looking to stock up on your extended cartridges. He’s ordered more.

Keen, Judy and Tim Evans of USA Today, Indianapolis Star, 13 January 2011

Quote-idan

“I keep reminding people karma means ‘doing.’ What you sow, you reap. So you create your own karma by doing; your karma is your deeds.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

“Paradoxically, I believe that Europe’s influence depends on our not having great military power or imperial ambitions any longer. We are able to play an objective role in which we are trusted because we seek genuinely to end conflict, assist development, and resolve differences, not distrusted for being thought to have a hidden agenda.” – Catherine Ashton

“More money, by a factor of 50% was raised in IPO’s in China than in London and the United States this calendar year.” – Eliot Spitzer

“The rule for government: Be there. Do something.” – Eugene Robinson

“It is, after all, an option. To see these people dressed up as the founding fathers who want more freedom, but you don’t want an option? It’s actually more freedom, you see there.” – Bill Maher, regarding opposition to the public option during the health care debate

“Certainly, it’s worth asking if the Western tradition of militarism, which can now boast nearly three millennia of success, is reaching the end of its usefulness, even if any attempt to answer this question definitively would be premature.” – Thomas Cahill

“Community has worked; those who brand it a failure don’t have a stake in its success.” – Dan Carpenter

“It’s a classic case of, I don’t know what you want to call it, semantic corruption.” – Jerome Chanes, on the recent use of the term “blood libel”

 Excerpted, Stephen L. Carter

“But how is the public to figure out who’s winning?…How many battles of the Iraq war can the reader name? How many from Afghanistan? Out of either ignorance or condescension, the modern news media rarely tell us. One night a year or so after the fall of Baghdad, my wife and I were watching the evening news. The anchor recounted a fierce battle in southern Iraq, and told us how many American soldiers died. Here is what he did not tell us: what piece of ground the battle was contesting, what difference it made who prevailed, and who won. This is not, as the right would have it, some mystical anti-war bias. This is simple ineptitude.”

Carter, Stephen L. The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama, 2011. Excerpted in Newsweek, January 10 and 17, 2011.

Recommendations: Two to Read, One to Watch

Dan Carpenter, “Losing Common Ground,” Indianapolis Star, 9 January 2011

President Obama’s Tucson Memorial Speech, 12 January 2011

Watch: Countdown to Zero, Lucy Walker’s 2010 documentary about nuclear weapons

  

Memo: Random

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“O Beauty ever ancient and ever new!”

An urgent car question led me into the auto parts store on the corner a couple weeks ago. The clerk was a young man in his early twenties. Neither of these things is remarkable. But the young man’s face could have been painted by Botticelli and then brought to life: fine-boned, translucent, belonging to any time or no time, somehow otherworldly. It was a face too delicate to be real, a genderless and beautiful face that gave nothing away but its loveliness. Strange and exotic, there against the orangey fluorescent glare of the store with its metal, bottles, and rubbery smell, and there it was. How I love spotting grace in unexpected places.

What Say You, Walsingham?

“I’m trying to catch my breath so I don’t refer to this, um, ah, maneuver goin’ on today as, uh, chicken crap.” John Boehner

“Men preserve agreements that profit no one to violate.” Solon

“No, no, no. You’re confusing me with Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, when asked if he was born in a log cabin

“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” Winston Churchill

“All writers are inherently curious.” Alain de Botton

“If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would greatly deteriorate the cat.” Mark Twain

“Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Albert Einstein

Last Week’s Smackdown Highlight

“No, it’s just a bewilderingly strange position. I can’t see how any intelligent human being could make that argument,” replied economist Robert Frank in response to Representative John Shadegg’s (R-AZ) statement that the unemployed do not spend benefit money and that consumption doesn’t drive the U.S. economy. (The Rachel Maddow Show, 30 November 2010)

And what if it did not have to be that way?

President Carter recently appeared on The Diane Rehm Show to give an interview. He was asked about his friendship with President Ford. How could he be close friends with a man who said such terrible things about him in public? To which President Carter replied that Ford always called him up beforehand and would explain and apologize and Carter would accept, knowing the audience Ford was facing. “I knew he had to say those things.”

But what if he didn’t have to say those things? What if the truth was given, whether the audience expected it or not? Is there a chance that we don’t get the politics we deserve, that rather, we get the politics we and they expect? What if he, what if any of the politicians didn’t feel they had to say those things? What if one day they said what needed to be said and not what they assumed we wanted to hear?

Tuesday’s Factoid

Indiana is one of only 14 states without a sustainable/renewable energy production requirement.

Monday: Morning Edition

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Healthy Self-Image in Alaskan Maternal Grizzly Bears (A Moment of Snark)

While it can be difficult to assess the mental health and self-image of maternal grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) in the wild, the rare specimens of a vocal, media-savvy, domesticated sub-group have recently given indications that concerns about positive self-image in maternal grizzlies may be unfounded. In a study to be released in December, scientist Barbara Walters interviewed one member of this sub-group known as “Sarah” or “Mama Grizzly.” Sarah exhibited a very solid sense of self and an extremely high rate of self-confidence, even responding in the affirmative to the question “Can you beat Barack Obama for the presidency in 2012?” While it is believed that Sarah’s response may be due to her fame as a celebrity and ability to increase ratings for the American television program Dancing with the Stars, it is unknown if these are reasonable criteria for confidence in the ability to become president. Further study will be required to determine the connection between reality and self-image and whether such high levels of confidence are actually beneficial.

See Something, Say Something

Last week, Janet Napolitano announced that the Department of Homeland Security would be starting a poster campaign called “See Something, Say Something,” encouraging the public to be afraid, be very afraid be watchful of one another in gas stations, train stations, airports, hospitals, etc. and to report suspicious activity. (Which I thought was common sense and already what people were doing, thus not requiring millions of big-print paper reminders that we should spy on each other.)  Maybe this is all necessary now. Maybe this makes us more secure. Between posters, body scans and full-body contact frisking, the DHS is making us safer one degrading, paranoia-inducing, creepy-titled measure at a time, increasing a general sense of suspicion and distrust of both government and one another (which is helpful since there probably wasn’t enough of that to go around). Thank you, printer-cartridge people. Thanks, plastic-explosives in underwear guy. Now, everybody remain calm. And make sure the guy next to you is doing the same.

Monday’s Factoid

Global Download Speeds (in MBps): Korea 33.5, Japan 23.8, Sweden 16.5, Finland 15.8, Netherlands 14.9, Romania 13.9, Hong Kong 12.9, Germany 11.6, Portugal 11.5, Switzerland 10.2, Iceland 9.8, US 9.6*

Hey! We’re Number 12! In the world! Go, Superpower, Go!

(I think I just rolled my eyes in that charmingly insolent way of adolescent girls. Lack of attention to infrastructure will do that. Pavlov, bell, dog.)

*Rounded numbers; Sources: Oxford University, CISCO, Newsweek

Best Quote of Last Week

“…because, you know, often soldiers and the symbols or representations of soldiers are claimed by the far left or the far right to mean a certain thing. And we do the young men an injustice in not digesting fully their reality.” Tim Hetherington, interview, PBS NewsHour, November 16, 2010

Quote Vadis?

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“Whenever you hear a euphemism, it means someone is lying or is cowardly.” George Orwell

“An entire generation of Beltway journalists has come of age being taught that the way to succeed is to be a smart—if not smart-alecky—young thing.”  Todd Purdum

“Mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely on to explain everything else.”  Sam Harris

“The entire world has come to the conclusion that forests should be worth more standing than cut down. Farmers should get paid for that.”  Blairo Maggi

“Americans should remember that we are your backyard – our polluted waterways are your mercury-laced toys. It’s all connected.” Ma Jun

“The Senate is a dues-paying organization now. Junior members have to raise this much, committee chairs have to raise that much. Find that in a civics book.” Evan Bayh

“American teens do rate No. 1 in one area—self-confidence. Even when they’re 12th or 18th or 21st in some academic category, they still think they’re No. 1.”  Jonathan Alter

Excerpted: Travels with Charley

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From John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America

  •  “American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.”
  • “He said bitterly, ‘If anywhere in your travels, you come on a man with guts, mark the place. I want to go to see him. I haven’t seen anything but cowardice and expediency. This used to be a nation of giants. Where have they gone?…’  ‘Must be somewhere,’ I said… ‘There used to be a thing or commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone….Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln….’ I remember retorting, ‘Maybe the People are always those who used to live the generation before last.’”
  •  “Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?”
  • “But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself…I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”
  • “…all the polls and opinion posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other…”

Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley: In Search of America. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

Caesar’s Breath (O Random! My Random!)

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Quotey  McQuoterson

“I thought equality was non-negotiable.” Lady Gaga

“What if we say ‘Okay, you can invade Iran, but it has to be all the gay guys.’“ Seth MacFarlane

“We’ve already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better batteries, and nanotechnology. Instead of racing to catch up, we’re buying seeds and garden gnomes on Facebook. This won’t end well.” Daniel Lyons

“In a dream, you saw a way to survive and you were filled with joy.” Jenny Holzer

Children’s Hour

John McCain at a California fundraiser said that Barbara Boxer “is the most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today. I know that because I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having to serve with her.”

Senator McCain, for starters, no, you didn’t have to. You’re the one who wanted to be on the big boy team. You were the one fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work on Capitol Hill and make the country better. And you chose to take it. But, honestly, no one made you serve…

And, if you’re going to play on the big boy team, you should know that at this point in this wonderfully modern and advanced society of ours, girls play there too and the optics of the homme picking on the femme might not be politically advantageous to said homme. Further, on the big boy team, sometimes there are other people on the team you don’t like. Work with them anyway. And be polite about it. See, outside of the Washington bubble in the real world, most of us have to (literally have to) work with one or two colleagues we dislike. But, being adults, most of us understand that to stand in front of a microphone and tout our disaffection, nay, our disdain for our “unpleasant” colleagues is to utterly destroy any chance of a productive working relationship. And makes us seem a little petty, infantile, and ill-mannered. Besides, sometimes we don’t wish to hurt people, even those we don’t enjoy working with, even those we actively dislike. So, as grown-ups do, we don’t say that sort of thing out loud. We certainly don’t say it where it might be heard, including in front of a live microphone at an event covered by the national media when we are, in theory, one of the grand elder statesmen of the country. Unless we are preferencing our temper tantrums over our gravitas, behaving like a toddler instead of a grown-up.

But maybe it’s the California air…after all, we had Ms. Fiorina channeling Lindsay Lohan in a Mean Girl moment, making fun of Senator Boxer’s hair.

So if people are wondering who’s watching the store or where the grown-ups are, or if you end up scratching your head and asking why John Q. Public doesn’t trust Washington, including you, Mr. McCain, perhaps it’s because from the outside your behavior appears exceptionally surly and utterly childish. And for all Boxer’s “bitter partisanship,” it has not included the very public expression of the “unpleasant experience of having” to serve with you, Senator.

Actually…

“If there’s anything voters don’t want to hear in 2010 it’s Washington inside talk.” (Mark Shields, NewsHour, 15 October 2010).

Oh, Mr. Shields, yes. Yes, actually, we do. We want to hear the guts of it all. We want to be spoken to as equals, as grown-ups, as fellow citizens and not an unknowing and uncaring gaggle of Ordinary Americans. We don’t care if CBO is mentioned (this was your example, and honestly, Congressional Budget Office is not so esoteric that it should count as “inside”). See, the abbreviations don’t really fuss us. We actually really, really do want to know the inside stuff, in detail, and in long form. Even if it’s bad news, even if it’s longer than a 30-second sound bite, even if it doesn’t guarantee a great job, sunshine and roses, and zero budget deficit with zero tax increases for everyone forever and ever, amen.

Really. Besides, Washington inside talk would sound like a choir of angels after the mindless, slogan-filled, short-form generic and/or jingoistic pablum that we’ve been fed and fed up with of late.

For Your Delectation: Read.

“Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury,” Vanity Fair, Michael Joseph Gross

“A Tea Party Taxonomy,” Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg

“Washington, We Have a Problem,” Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum

For Your Delectation: Watch. (Or listen. Podcast on itunes.)

“God in America,” three-part series from Frontline and American Experience.

 

Mashed Quotations

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“Everything is a miracle. It’s a miracle not to melt in the bathtub like a lump of sugar.” Pablo Picasso

“I’m not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Barack Obama

“Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour.” William Morris

“You know what happens when a wind turbine falls in the ocean? A splash.” Bill Maher

“It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.” Sarah Palin

“And, lastly, there are some who wish to learn that they may be themselves edified; and that is prudence.” St. Bernard of Clairvaux

“The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” William Faulkner