Quotables

"There's little question that America changed after September 11, 2001. The world, with all its inequities and anger, was suddenly much closer, and we no longer had the luxury of ignoring it. News became more serious and more global, and it seemed for a time that shift would become permanent. Yet, paradoxically, the past six years have also seen an explosion in superficial celebrity coverage, as if Lindsay Lohan were a morning-after pill for Iraq."

-- Smith, Sean. "Angelina Wants to Save the World." Newsweek. June 25, 2007.

"Those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it."

-- Dumbledore, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" p 575

"And, if you knew anything about the military at all, you would know class division is a neccessity. If everyone was on an equal playing field, there would be no incentive to lead if there was no benefit (same basic problem with communism). And, also, I don't quite understand what your problem with class division is in the first place? Are you a socialist?"

-- "Bill" from the military in response to my class essay

"There's more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it... We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice."

-- from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, 24-25

"I'm the barium of the political colon" -- Stephen Colbert

(Emily Lazar, producer of The Colbert Report heard Stephen refer to him as such. This was repeated by Walter Isaacson at Aspen Institute Ideas Festival.)