The Year in Quotes

"When people go, `Oh, that hurricane must have been God's will' -
baloney! ... If I go out and get drunk and run over a pregnant mother and kill her and her baby, that's not God's will, that's my will."Rick Warren

“I felt this thrill going up my leg!”Chris Matthews

In a Dec. 14 list of the Top 10 quotes of 2008 as compiled by the Yale Book of Quotations, The Associated Press, relying on information from the book's editor, incorrectly attributed the origin of two quotes.
Professor Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard, in a 2007 article in Cato Journal, was the first to write, "They say 'there are no atheists in foxholes.' Perhaps, then, there are also no libertarians in crises." Economist Paul Krugman repeated a version of the statement later on a TV show.
Also, "Cash for trash" in reference to the financial bailout did not originate with Krugman. He used the phrase in his New York Times column, but doesn't recall where he first heard it.The Associated Press

"It's so cold, MSNBC employees gathered around Keith Olbermann's giant head for warmth."David Letterman, or one of his writers.

"But, I did want to start the show by thanking you, Tucker. You're about the only show on MSNBC that consistently allows a Clinton perspective to be expressed." Lanny Davis

"I'm sorry, I don't talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately. Even though I think you're cute."Chelsea Clinton

"You can put lipstick on a pig — it's still a pig"World-class orator Barack Obama

"So we just don't have enough capacity right now to deal with -- and it's not just troops, by the way. It's like Arab -- Arab -- Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers, we only have a certain number of them, and if they're all in Iraq, then it's harder for us to use them, and -- and obviously they may not speak Arabic, but the various dialects that they speak in Afghanistan, oftentimes people who speak Urdu or Pashtun or whatever the languages are, they're going to be needed in those areas, and a lot of them have ended up being placed elsewhere." Barack Obama

"You know what they will say? They will say 'it would cost too much money.' But you know what? It would cost abou... ..ih.. ih..it would cost about the same as what we would spend... ih... over the course of ten years it would cost what it costs us ... ih...ih.... Ha! ...awright...okay...we're going to...ih, it would cost us about the same as it would cost... for about.... Hold on one second. I can't hear myself. But I'm glad you're fired up, though. I'm glad. Hih, hih." Barack Obama, sending thrills up our legs as he deftly moves on from his 'breathalyzer' proposal.

"I don’t think I can take any sh#& from anybody on that, do you?” Bill Clinton

"Being a senator, you don't have to know about every issue coming in. That's what your staffs are for." Michael Bloomberg

"I think there's some dispute as to whether Huma's actually human or not." Anthony Weiner

"GM has a very bright future." Rick Wagoner

"History shows you don't know what the future brings." Rick Wagoner

"It sucks.I used to be governor of New York." Eliot Spitzer

"I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained." Ben Bernanke

"I'm warning you with peace and love, I have too much to do. So no more fan mail." Ringo Starr

"If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down" George W. Bush

"I want to cut his n**s off. Barack, he's talking down to black people." Jesse Jackson

"The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today." Antonin Scalia

"Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going." Heath Ledger

"I don't talk about these tabloids. They're tabloid trash and just full of lies." John Edwards


“Here's what...can I explain to you what happened? First of all it happened during a period after she was in remission from cancer.” John Edwards

“The country is groaning and moaning and screaming for change...”Bill Clinton

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" Joe Biden

"Stand Up, Chuck. Let 'em see ya. Oh! God love ya. What am I talkin' about?" Joe Biden

"You can not go to a Seven Eleven or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian Accent." Joe Biden

"I can see Russia from my house!” Tina Fey, i.e., not Sarah Palin

"I will fight. I will fight. I will fight until I take my last breath." Rod Blagojavich

"I don't believe a cloud hangs over me. I think there's nothing but sunshine hanging over me." Rod Blagojavich

“Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty.” Jerehmiah Wright

"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." Hillary Clinton

“Generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment—when the rise of the oceans began to slow and out planet began to heal.“ Barack Obama, sending another thrill up Matthew's leg, while pulling everone else's.

"When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking. Brothers and sisters, Barack Obama to me, is a herald of the Messiah. Barack Obama is like the trumpet that alerts you something new, something better is on the way. A black man with a white mother became a savior to us." Louis Farrakhan (note that the video was removed as a 'terms of use' violation")

"Our opponent is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." Sarah Palin

"I think that, in retrospect, I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric. [Phrases such as] 'bring them on' or 'dead of alive' indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace." George W. Bush

"If you believe the left is tolerant, open-minded and democratic, you're in for a rude awakening." David Limbaugh

"The very same people who don't want the fairness doctrine want the FCC to limit pornography. I am for that. I think pornography should be limited. But you can't say the government 'hands off' in one area to a commercial enterprise but st...uh you're allowed to intervene in another. That's not consistent." Chuck Schumer

"The great novelist Ayn Rand advised us in the Fountainhead that our country, the greatest country in the world, was founded on the basis of individuals, where people were encouraged to adventure, not to be complacent; to be daring, not dormant; to prosper, not to plunder. David Paterson

"I told him last night, 'You know, Joe, I can't stand John McCain.'" Harry Reid

"I fired him. He's crazy." Rupert Murdoch

"My friend Joe Biden has a tendency to talk forever and sometimes say stuff that's kind of stupid." Claire McKaskill

“There is no one more surprised than I — except, of course, my husband. You know what they say, ‘Behind every successful woman there is an astonished man.”’ General Ann E. Dunwoody

"This seriously is like the ninth best moment of my life." Michael Phelps

"There is no innocent explanation." Bernie Madoff

Obama's people will move into the White House and find that none of the O keys have been pried off the keyboards. There won't be porn mixed in with the paper in the copying machines. "The Lone Ranger"

"He didn't have the political courage to make the statement of walking out." Jerrold Nadler "

"For Barack Obama to condemn my daughter for past indiscretions when he admitted to the exact same himself is indicative of what kind of president he would be," Micheal Lohan

Today's list: 10 things that won't survive the recession. List makers love that number ten, don't they?

Stratfor.com's obituary for Deep Throat. We now know why he did it. Here, they say, is how he did it:

For [Mark] Felt to have been able to guide and control the young reporters’ investigation [i.e. Woodward and Bernstein], he needed to know a great deal of what the White House had done, going back quite far. He could not possibly have known all this simply through his personal investigations. His knowledge covered too many people, too many operations, and too much money in too many places simply to have been the product of one of his side hobbies. The only way Felt could have the knowledge he did was if the FBI had been systematically spying on the White House, on the Committee to Re-elect the President and on all of the other elements involved in Watergate. Felt was not simply feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein; he was using the intelligence product emanating from a section of the FBI to shape The Washington Post’s coverage

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You can now read PDF files without downloading them, via Gmail

Ten Skills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything.

Here's a pet peeve of mine: headline writers who know nothing about the subject matter of their stories. This seems particularly prevalent in sports. Look at this one: No. 2 Fla. stuns No. 1 'Bama 31-20 for SEC title. Stuns? Stuns? The Gators were a 10-point favorite in Vegas. Nobody but the headline writer was stunned by the final score.