Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Words inscribed
at the Statue of Liberty
(from Emma Lazarus' poem,
The New Colossus)

When history comes a-calling, you never have a choice between good or bad options. They're only between bad and much, much worse options. And the reality of today is that we're dealing with problems that could have been, would have been easier to settle twenty years ago. If we don't settle them now, they'll be much more difficult, if not impossible to settle in ten years time.

Mark Steyn

How come insulting the prophet of Muslims worldwide is justified within the framework of press freedom, but investigating about the fairy tale Holocaust is not?

Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

If the bits of burning material land on anyone's skin or eye, they will stick and cause serious injury or blindness.

"Warning for Flagburners"
published by MrFlag.com
on its internet sales site
(full story here)

We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible [for unflattering cartoons of the Prophet].

Unidentified "Preacher" Appealing to
"Worshipers" at a Palestinian Mosque

Q: Can I also ask you, on Senator Kerry's comments, what is your reaction to the filibuster call by Senator Kerry, on Judge Alito?

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY SCOTT McCLELLAN: On his call yesterday? It was a pretty historic day. This was the first time ever that a Senator has called for a filibuster from the slopes of Davos, Switzerland. I think even for a Senator, it takes some pretty serious yodeling to call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the Swiss Alps. (Laughter.)

Q: But you know he's not there skiing.

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, I didn't ask you to yodel. I can hear you. (Laughter.

White House Press Briefing
January 27, 2006

The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part. This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.

France's President Jacques Chirac

Our state is bankrupt. . . . Even if it would sell to the Japanese the Palace of Versailles at a high price, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, all of our patrimony, the French state could not honour her commitments for retirees or salaries. The king is completely nude.

Pascal Gobry
French Institute of Actuaries

[T]he Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn. . . .

What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman

I hardly find it surprising that comments from this [internal Washington Post] forum would get leaked to the Times or any other news organization. . . . journalists leak to other journalists when it comes to the in-love-with-ourselves gossip of the media reporting on the media.

Comment of Washington Post Reporter Sara Goo,
leaked from a WaPo internal message board,
wherein Goo opined about leaks of statements
WaPo staffers had posted (on that same board)
about Bob Woodward misusing leaks

France is still a country where one can go.

French Foreign Minister
Philippe Douste-Blazy

The violence will not end until the occupation has been defeated. Therefore, France must immediately set a firm date to withdraw its forces from Paris.

Overheard at the United Nations

He's a warmonger, and I'm not.

Cindy Sheehan,
after her meeting with Sen. John McCain,
who was a POW in Vietnam for five years

The moral choices in America are not about hot-button social issues that get everybody mad. Moral choices are about making sure that folks don't drown at a nursing home before they can get evacuated.

Howard Dean, Democrat Party Chairman,
implying that President Bush was to blame
for deaths at St. Rita's Nursing Home

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

I said, "We've got two buses and two drivers that'll take you anywhere you want to go. Do you want the buses?" She said, "No".

Byran Bertucci, St. Bernard Parish Coroner,
describing how the owners of the nursing home
refused multiple offers to evacuate its patients

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Thirty-four people drowned in a nursing home when it should have been evacuated . . . The pathetic thing in this case is that [the nursing home owners] were asked if they wanted to move [their patients] and they did not move. They were warned repeatedly.

Lousiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti,
announcing negligent homicide indictments
against the owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home

Prayer and pity for loss is a cleansing thing but it is fire of outrage than fuels forward motion. It dawned on me in the buildup to the nonstop theater of [9/11] anniversary angst how manipulative sentimentality can be. Those whose goal it is to make us miserable weaken our resolve. Those who convince us that we are cold and unfeeling if we even for a moment entertain thoughts of justice, and yes, revenge, seek to disarm us. They seek to subjugate us by making us inadequate to any task other than weeping and rending our garments.

Lucianne Goldberg

No one would accuse [Houston] of being timid in the scramble to profit from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

NY Times' International Herald Tribune
Article Trashing Houston for Its Efforts
to Aid Katrina Victims

I wish [Cindy Sheehan] would just stop. . . . But don't use my son--just don't.

Charlotte Smette
mother of Sgt. Keith Smette
who gave his life fighting in Iraq

I'm just so honored that the universe chose me to be the spark that has set off a raging inferno.

Cindy Sheehan

I ask myself if musicians ought to act like politicians . . . . They're only musicians.

Eric Clapton

When [Cindy Sheehan] put that cross up, with my husband's name on it, that's when she crossed the line.

Linnie Blankenbecler,
whose husband, Sgt. Maj. James Blankenbecler,
gave his life fighting in Iraq, Oct. 1, 2003

I don't care what [Cindy Sheehan] says or does. She is no more important than any other mother.

Robin Griffin
mother of Spc. Kyle Andrew Griffin
who was killed in Iraq May 30, 2003

Thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year in which we completed the [Uranium Conversion Facility] in Esfahan. . . . Today we are in a position of power: [The UCF] in Esfahan is complete and UF4 and UF6 gases are being produced. We have a stockpile of products, and during this period, we have managed to convert 36 tons of yellow cake into gas and store it. In Natanz, much of the work [on centrifuges to enrich uranium ] has been completed. . . . Thanks to our dealings with Europe, even when we got a 50-day ultimatum, we managed to continue the work for two years. This way we completed [the UCF] in Esfahan. This way we carried out the work to complete Natanz, and on top of that, we even gained benefits. . . . During these two years of negotiations, we managed to make far greater progress than North Korea.

Hosein Musavian, Chairman
Iran Supreme National Security Council
Foreign Policy Committee

My brother volunteered to go. He wanted to go, and we honor his commitment.

Jim Krause,
whose brother, Sgt. Elmer C. Krause,
died fighting in Iraq

You know, Captain, sometimes American values are just--better.

Steven Vincent
Journalist and Patriot
Murdered in Iraq

We should not waste time searching old white ladies.

Ian Johnston
Chief Constable
British Transport Police

I've got rights!

London bombing suspect
at the moment of his arrest

It's not like when I hired them they had to fill out a questionnaire and say, "I'm a Democrat."

Ron Lurie,
creator of Commander-in-Chief, explaining why
no "openly Republican" actors work on that show

We are looking at the possibility someone drank the water without knowing it was a piece of art. Or it could have been thrown away by a member of staff who didn't recognise what it was.

Police spokesman explaining the status of their
investigation into the disappearance of an object
displayed at the Way with Words Festival art exhibit

I would like to see the Islamic flag fly, not only over number 10 Downing Street, but over the whole world.

Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed
Imam and Founder
London Chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir

Given that the Palestinians don’t have jet fighters and don’t have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In that unfair balance, that is what people use.

Ken Livingstone
Mayor of London

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

I am against people who advocate suicide bombing, whether it's in London, whether it's in Afghanistan or Iraq or it's in Palestine or its in Turkey or Kashmir or anywhere. They have got no place, such people, in our country.

Tony Blair

These suicide bombers are desperate people. They are not getting their rights. They can see that their brothers are not getting their rights, so they take extreme action. This lad has made a name for himself in the world. Muslims call it a sacrifice, the Europeans call him a terrorist. There will be more.

Bashir Ahmed
uncle of Shehzad Tanweer, 22,
the London bomber whose father
had recently given him a red Mercedes

The great thing about having a blog is that you get to publish your opinion all over the world without having to worry about anybody reading it.

Bathus

Verbal condemnations and choreographed press releases against violent terrorist acts, as Britain's Muslim leaders produced last Thursday, are no longer sufficient.

Mansoor Ijaz

The term "civilians" does not exist in Islamic religious law.

Hani Siba'i
Head of London Center for Islamic History

My shattered face and frail body demonstrate the inherent contradictions of a regime in which the concepts of justice and tyranny have been transposed. Whoever sees me today asks me in astonishment: "Is that you? Are you Ganji?"

. . . but my heart will continue to beat for freedom.

Akbar Ganji
in a letter smuggled from a gulag in Iran
where he is in the process of being tortured to death

We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East.

Only then will the innocents here and abroad be able to enjoy a life free of the threat of needless violence.

George Galloway
MP for Bethnal Green and Bow

Geldof and company will lay claim to the very last thing so many Africans own: our problems. And it will be terrible and evil beyond imagining, for owning your problem is at the heart of what it is to be human. It is when we wrestle and suffer and triumph over our problems that we are most human, but this alas is not to be if the soul stealers on show succeed. I do not want anyone to suffer needlessly. I would prefer everyone to live in a democratic, prosperous community that knows no war or want. But these are conditions that must be battled and struggled for; they have never arrived as a gift from a stranger.
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤Is it unreasonable to argue that Africa's greatest resource is its suffering?Bono, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan and other more junior members of the International Do-Gooder Club (IDGC) waste few chances to lecture audiences on their moral responsibility to the benighted African continent. Capitalized words like Justice, International Community, Conscience and Humanity are thrown about with reckless abandon. More radical members of the IDGC, safely making pronouncements between grant applications to the same institutions they purport to loathe, prefer to use Neocolonialism, Racism, the North-South Paradigm, Resistance and Solidarity. Their African counterparts have formed the International Beggar Elite Club (IBEC). They don't care what words are used as long as the conclusion is Cash Money.

Martin Mbugua Kimani
Kenyan Blogger
at African Bullets & Honey

It is a decision of the Supreme Court, so this is almost as if God has spoken.

Nancy Pelosi

If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court ... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.

Abraham Lincoln

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Thomas Jefferson

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand.

Abraham Lincoln

I choose [U.S.] citizenship because I believe what the Americans believe, their value system, their freedoms.

U.S. Army chaplain Jin Hee Chang
born in South Korea
naturalized June 23, 2005

The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world.

Mahmod Ahmadinejad
Newly-elected Iranian "president" and terrorist

There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining "punishment" and being "supposed to punish" hurts it, arouses fear in it. "Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible." With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence. . . .

Whoever examines the conscience of the European today will have to pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hideouts--the imperative of herd timidity: "We want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!"

Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
(Kaufmann trans.)

Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution.

Justice Clarence Thomas,

Kelo v. City of New London

Economists tell me, on the one hand this, and on the other hand that. What I need are some one-armed economists.

President Harry S. Truman

I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood’s use of the a—-hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly sceptical of his motives and everything else. The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive.

Andrew Jaspan, editor of the left-wing daily The Age
on Douglas Wood's description of his jihadist captors

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Helen Keller,

born June 27, 1880

To be a Muslim woman
is to be born
for the pleasure of men.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
Somali-born Dutch feminist

Ask the French why the heck for so many years they encouraged Poles to build capitalism when as it turns out they are Communists themselves.

Lech Walesa,
Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Solidarity

When I was given the news I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true. . . . Europe is no longer Europe, it is "Eurabia," a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty.

Oriana Fallaci,
indicted in Italy for "vilification" of Islam