Past quotes of the day:
“As I wrote in my common sense, bulldozer of truth book “Ted, White and Blue,” you do not have a “right” to health care, but rather a personal responsibility for it. From my vantage point, too many Americans obviously do not care about their health but have the unmitigated audacity to want someone else to pay for their health care damage control. That attitude is soulless, irresponsible and un-American. I am not of the same species as these bloodsuckers.”
Ted Nugent, from “Fedzilla Goes Quack”, Mar. 10, 2009
“This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it’s the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn’t just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We’re falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.”
Matthew Parris, from “There’s no new motor to drive the economy”, Jan. 24, 2009
“The problems are more difficult than I had imagined them to be. The responsibilities placed on the United States are greater than I imagined them to be, and there are greater limitations upon our ability to bring about a favorable result than I had imagined them to be. And I think that is probably true of anyone who becomes President, because there is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate, and between the man who must select from the various alternatives proposed and say that this shall be the policy of the United States. It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments. . . .”
President John F. Kennedy
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
P.J. O’Rourke
“I don’t believe in destiny. I believe in good pitching and good defense and timely hitting. That’s destiny. You do enough of that, you create your own destiny.”
Cubs manager Lou Piniella, when asked if the 2008 edition of his team was a “team of destiny”, from a dailyherald.com story, Aug. 30, 2008
“What Obama did today may have been politically necessary. It was certainly politically expedient. And it is yet one more blow to Obama’s image as a different kind of politician. In fact, as we’ve learned over the last few months, Obama appears to be a Chicago politician through and through. When he perceived a threat to his self-interest, he cut his ties to first his pastor and then his church, both of which he had expressed familial love and fidelity. This whole episode is deeply unattractive, even as it is deeply revealing.”
Peter Wehner, from corner.nationalreview.com, May 31, 2008
“What is more scary than any particular candidate or policy is the gullibility of the public and their willingness to be satisfied with talking points, rather than serious arguments.”
Columnist Thomas Sowell, from “Random Thoughts”, Apr. 8, 2008
“You’re going to have to spend either more time or more money, and perhaps a little bit of both. And I think that’s just the reality. It’s really a question of priorities, and we have, in effect, devalued food. And what I’m arguing is to move it a little closer to the center of our lives, and that we are going to have to put more into it, but that it will be very rewarding if we do. And if we don’t, by the way, we are going to suffer from this — you know, we hear this phrase so many times — this epidemic of chronic disease. But the fact is, we are at a fork in the road. We’re either going to get used to chronic disease, and be … in the age of Lipitor and dialysis centers on every corner in the city, or we’re going to change the way we eat. I mean, it’s really that simple. Most of the things that are killing us these days — whether it’s heart disease, diabetes, obesity, many, many cancers — are directly attributed to the way we’re eating.”
author Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food, “‘In Defense of Food’ Author Offers Advice for Health”, Jan. 1, 2008
“We should remember on this Veterans Day that some very young people — with long futures, in the prime of health, and at the center of their families — died for the rest of us. They lost their lives not just for us to watch an OJ outburst in Vegas or American Idol, but for the idea that we — most often not so young, not so hale, and not with such bright futures as our soldiers — could be free at their expense; free, not merely from being conquered or enslaved, but free from the very thought of it.”
Victor Davis Hanson, “Freedom, Even from Fear – Remembering the special sacrifices of our veterans.”, Nov. 13, 2007
“The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures”
Dr. William Gray, Sydney Morning Herald, “Gore Gets a Cold Shoulder”, Oct. 15, 2007
“Every new fact discovered through experiment represents a foothold in the unknown. In a wilderness of knowledge, it can be difficult to distinguish error from fraud, sloppiness from deception, eagerness from greed or, increasingly, scientific conviction from partisan passion. As scientific findings become fodder for political policy wars over matters from stem-cell research to global warming, even trivial errors and corrections can have larger consequences.”
Robert Lee Hotz, Wall Street Journal, “Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis”, Sep. 14, 2007
