"The president's state-of-the-union message to Congress is one of the odder rituals of American politics—a mixture of pomp and circumstance (all those Supreme Court judges in their black gowns and military leaders with their chests full of medals) and frat-boy hugging and hollering. The president serves up some hokum about how “the state of the union is strong” and America is a “shining city on a hill”. Everybody stands and claps enthusiastically. He tosses out some red meat for members of his own party. Half the chamber rises to its feet. He throws in an obscure scheme to please this or that cabinet secretary. The secretary rises, while everybody else looks bemused." - quoted from: The Economist
"[...] in this [the present George W. Bush] administration, the learning curve is a right angle." - quoted from: The Los Angeles Times
"Mrs Clinton is an inspiration-free zone." - quoted from: The Economist, Feb. 7, 2008, p. 30
"Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe. But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all." - Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy, quoted from: The New York Times online edition, March 9, 2008
"Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone." - Walter Bagehot, quoted from: The Economist, March 22, 2008, p. 11
"The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see ." - Winston Churchill; quoted from: The Economist, March 22, 2008, p. 16
"Occasionally, I am a human being like everyone else." - Hillary Clinton on why she "mis-spoke" by claiming to have landed in Tuzla in Bosnia under sniper fire when she hadn't, quoted from: The Economist, March 29, 2008, p. 40
"Sam Nunn, the worthy but very boring former chairman of the senate armed services committee who makes Gordon Brown look like a firebrand preacher" - quoted from: The Guardian: The Wrap, May 23, 2008
"In any other country [than the USA], the incredible circus that has marked the past year could not have occurred." - quoted from: The Economist, June 5, 2008
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of the internet, quoted from: The Economist, online edition, June 26, 2008
"The Constitution is no 'suicide pact,' but the people who founded this nation risked war, prison and death for the sake of unalienable human rights. Their values guided us through good times and bad, through the Civil War, two world wars and the Cold War. But today, some Americans seem happy to discard those same precious values in the name of 'security.'
Sometimes I wonder: If the founders could have foreseen this, would they have bothered to fight the Revolutionary War?" - Rosa Brooks, columnist, in: The Los Angeles Times, online edition, July 3, 2008
"It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn't want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon." - Christopher Hitchens, in: Slate Magazine, July 7, 2008
"Two centuries later, the document [The Declaration of Independence] retains a surprisingly contemporary vitality, its list of 'usurpations' resonating today in its condemnation of trials without juries, transporting men 'beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses' and obstructing immigration, among other offenses, large and small." - quoted from: The Los Angeles Times, online edition, July 4, 2008
"I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!" - Tammany Hall's infamous Boss Tweed about cartoons drawn by Thomas Nast; quoted from: Slate Magazine, online edition, July 14, 2008
"'The students at the University of Texas may not be the best scholars in the world, but they're among the bravest. Anyone who crosses Guadalupe, the main drag by the campus, six times a dy without a police escort, has to be heroic.' I thought poeple drove crazy when I lectured at Coimbra University in Portugal, but Portuguese drivers are merely in training for the big time in Texas." - quoted from: James A.Michener, Texas [London, 1985], p. 3
"The man who wrote 'All men are created equal' had the time to do this because all his slaves were earning him money back on his estate." - quoted from: John O'Farrell, An Utterly Impartial History of Great Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge (London, 2007) p. 303
"Every year on the anniversary of the '1770 Boston Massacre' the event is re-enacted by the Boston Society. Not with live bullets, obviously, though the National Rifle Association is working on it." - quoted from: John O'Farrell, An Utterly Impartial History of Great Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge (London, 2007) p. 304
"[...] throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras many believed, including plenty ot women, that it would be most unbecoming of a lady to concern herself with politics. Women were clearly biologically different to men, they said, which made them physically unsuited to voting. It leaves you wondering which part of their body men used to vote with." - quoted from: John O'Farrell, An Utterly Impartial History of Great Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge (London, 2007) p. 426 f.
"[...] American presidential races are becoming more and more like high school popularity contests every four years." - quoted from: US News & World Report Online Edition September 13, 2008
"Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton" - Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms Magazine, quoted from: The Economist, online edition, Sept. 11, 2008
"While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." - Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert in: The New York Times, online edition, Sept. 12, 2008
"Why does this woman [Sarah Palin] – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so 'real'?
Because the Republicans, very clearly, believe that real people are idiots." - Judith Warner in: The New York Times, online edition, September 8, 2008
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