QuoteLog

“If you walk away from Iraq, the jihadis will follow you wherever you go. You may think you’ve left them behind, but they will pursue you.”

“I’m definitely torn, because I obviously don’t want any more of our soldiers getting killed, but I also wouldn’t mind the quagmire going on just long enough to ruin Bush’s re-election chances.”

“The GOP has now no crediibility as a party of fiscal discipline or small government. It’s just another tool of special interests - as beholden to them as the Dems are to theirs. Its pork barrel excesses may now be worse than the Dems, and the president seems completely unable or unwilling to restrain them.”

“Our notions of control, who’s an expert and what it takes to establish credibility, have been challenged, and the information dialog of the future may not resemble what we have known from the past.”

“Burn your naked photos. Don’t deny their existence: Just find them, obtain them and destroy them. Otherwise, when you become famous -- and all of us know, secretly, in our hearts, that one day we’ll be famous -- your naked photos will follow you. And they’ll become famous too.”

“Everyone seems to have an agenda, and everyone is such a complete unyielding pain in the ass about it that we have a shrieking cacophony of heartfelt sentiment. We have the fascism of absolute freedom. Somehow, everyone thinks that his core beliefs should translate to the law of the land. My feeling is that my core beliefs shouldn’t go any further than the tips of my fingers, and maybe my children.”

”...we may be soon entering a far scarier world, when America in exasperation -- as it did for most of its history before the European wars -- will simply shrug and say: ‘Good luck to you all.’”

“Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.”

“One reason we have television is to provide a high-tech means of spreading the word when the human race has stepped back into the cave and reverted to barbaric primitivism. It can happen at any moment, it seems, and all this week we will be remembering the moment it happened 40 years ago.”

“If war is coming, Southerners know that it’s better to fight on the other guy’s territory.”

“Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.”

“Bosses who don’t understand that a little catnap can make employees feel better and work better aren’t smart enough to be the boss.”

“The double standards here are obvious but worth a reminder. During the week anti-Bush protesters will, we’re told, be splashing red paint to symbolise the spilled blood of the people of Iraq. No such red paint was splashed around London after Halabja, after the 1991 Shia and Kurdish uprisings or during the Iran-Iraq war, almost as if that were not real Iraqi blood. Blood, after all, is only blood if Americans spill it.”

“Anti-anybody is dangerous. Anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust. Muslims attacked us but we are not allowed to be anti-Muslim -- nor should we be. That would be a ridiculous, offensive, unproductive, dangerous generalization. Right? Yet anti-American is suddenly OK.”

“Can anyone tell me why the world let Saddam remain and stood against America’s will to topple him? ... You all owe the Iraqi people an apology.”

“For people here outside the old hierarchy, the issue that the United States and Britain used to justify the war was never a prime concern. Despite the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds, the weapons that terrified Iraqis most were the pistol, the garrote and the gallows.”

“The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours.”

“It looks like the people of San Francisco are an endangered species, which may not be a bad thing. That’s probably good news for the country.”

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses -- behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road -- long before I dance under those lights.”

“It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and who’s coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag”

“But just as there are armchair warriors, who run none of the risks that they recommend for others, so there are armchair pacifists whose commitment isn’t tested by the threat to family or friends. Just other peoples’ families and friends. We still depend, even in the days of Trisha and trauma counselling, on men and women who will, if necessary, die on our behalf. And I must express my astonishment and gratitude that they will.”

“I think all Americans - and this is a joke! - all Americans, even if they’re from the South and ‘stupid,’ should be represented.”

“This is their place, their medium. They were there, online, before any company or organization. They were there before venture capital companies had wet dreams about ‘upswings’ and IPOs. They were there before a thousand experts decided that the web was about technology, design and process. They were there before some of those same experts announced that people don’t like to read online.”

“When what you’re doing feels like shooting fish in a barrel, you ought to be worried that things aren’t as simple as you think they are.”

“On Iraq, the war on terror, taxes and social policy the differences between Howard Dean and George W. Bush will be crystal clear. The American people will be like the proverbial sailboat captain facing a heavy wind as he tries to pull into the harbor. You can tack right or tack left but there really isn’t any ‘in between.’”

“So, when Election Day 2004 rolls around, who will I vote for? Answer: I don’t know. But what if things stay as they are now, with the Democratic candidates half-heartedly promising to rebuild Iraq while the Bush Administration says all the right things but only does half of them?”

“Look at what 9/11 did to you. It shocked you, and you can’t get over it to this day. Well let me invite you to Iraq where 9/11 is an everyday reality. How would you live your life? Stop comparing your ‘perfect’ society with mine. It isn’t the same. People don’t think the same. We don’t put flags and stickers on our cars to show how patriotic we are. We don’t go out in a ‘dentists against terrorism’ demonstration ... There are paintings on the walls all over Baghdad warning Arab foreigners from a bloody revenge if they keep messing with our affairs. Iraqis are openly calling the GC to quit the Arab League.”

“I don’t honestly know if the war was a good idea, and I don’t know how you add it up, because the results are still coming in. I’d appreciate a little less grandstanding from both quarters about how immoral the other side is, and, as a reward, I promise to reduce my frequency of opaque and bitter postings by up to 50%.”

“Washington may not succeed in turning Iraq into a ‘beacon of democracy’ but it will succeed, after all is said and done, in turning it into a society of laws and institutions where citizens, along with high-school kids, are protected against arbitrary arrest, incarceration, torture and execution.”

“One of the problems that we have with young people today is people talk down to you. You know, you get all pigeon-holed. They stereotype you. Exactly the same thing happens with people from the South. I have seen it. I have grown up with it. I’m here to tell you it is wrong. It is condescending.”

“What the people who blew up the Red Cross and the Iraqi police fear is not that we’re going to permanently occupy Iraq. They fear that we’re going to permanently change Iraq. The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because -- unlike many leftists -- they understand exactly what this war is about.”

“When the media showed pictures of Palestinians dancing in the street on September 11, 2001, we were admonished by the politically correct left to remember that those revelers shown only represented a small faction of all Palestinians and/or Muslims and that we should not judge an entire area by a small handful of zealots. But when the media shows members of the Iraqi resistance dancing in the streets after 15 American soldiers were killed, we are told by the left that they are a represention of all Iraqis.”

“The deal is, he’s gonna interrupt me and then eventually he’s gonna tell me to shut up. That’s what he does, then on to the next thing. Equating any of that with a serious political discussion is like thinking pro wrestling is real.”

“The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.”

“I feel like your concubine. You put money in my pocket. You put me in nice suits. You don’t tell anyone about me. You only call me when you need me.”

“Now, with the hot political wind blowing from conservative networks, talk radio and corporate boardrooms, when it’s become the fashion to bash the Democratic Party, you’ve joined in, writing a book betraying the people who stood behind every one of your campaigns -- not party activists, but hardworking Georgia families. You cast stone after stone at Democrats. Your silly, petty, and often personal attacks remind me of no one more than your old boss, Lester Maddox.”

“This morning I heard Katie Couric describe oral sex as ‘demeaning to girls’ for the second time this year. For some reason this drives me absolutely mad.”