A potpourri of quotations about topics in the news - some related and some un-....
Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the Palestinians: "What we need is, I believe, more responsible action on the part of the Palestinian Authority in order to bring terrorism under control - to make sure that violence is being brought to an end."
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Al Gore, on Bush and the terror war: (a) "In the presence of large campaign contributors, President Bush is a moral coward"; (b) "Osama bin Laden attacked us, but we couldn't find him in Afghanistan. And the light was better in Baghdad."
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Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., kicking off a national "Democrats for Bush" drive: "Fortunately, Democrats like us have a courageous and principled leader we're proud to support. It just so happens that he has a little 'R' after his name. ... Frankly, I've had it up to here with the politicians who claim to represent my party but really represent nothing but special-interest groups and their own partisan agendas. I remember when most Democrats were in favor of projecting America's power abroad, because we believed that America was a great force for good over evil. For decades the Democratic Party maintained peace through strength.
"We worked with Republicans to ensure that freedom and democracy would not falter in the face of any threat. These days it seems like some people in my party are motivated more by partisan politics than by national interest."
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Historian and author Paul Johnson: "Time and time again American presidents have been obliged to make dramatic decisions for the public good, without being able to quote legal chapter and verse to support them. Thus George Washington, assuming executive powers that had never before been exercised, put down the Whiskey Rebellion, which was threatening the basis of civil government, especially its right to raise taxes. Abraham Lincoln did the same in dealing with the South's secession. Theodore Roosevelt, through his determination to see the Panama Canal built ... brought a new country, Panama, into existence because its leading citizens were prepared to expedite the project. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the strictest secrecy, authorized the expenditure of vast sums on the Manhattan Project in order to build the first nuclear bomb. And Harry Truman authorized its actual use against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing the war in the Pacific to a speedy end and thus saving millions of lives. ... These presidents acted in what they believed to be the spirit of the U.S. Constitution and the best interests of their country. Attempting to consult national or global opinion or seeking guidance from the courts would have been impractical or led to fatal delays."
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David Gelernter, Yale professor and Unabomber victim: "People ask, why this big deal about Saddam? 'Isn't X evil too, and what about Y and how can you possibly ignore Z?' But we aren't automata; we are able to make distinctions. Some evil is beyond our power to stop. That doesn't absolve us from stopping what we can. All cruelty is bad. Yet some cruel and evil men are worse than others. By any standard we did right by overthrowing Saddam - and do wrong by denying or belittling that fact. The Democrats' refusal to acknowledge the moral importance of the Coalition's Iraq victory felt, at first, like the Clinton treatment - more relativistic, warped-Earth moral geometry in which the truth gradually approaches infinite malleability. ... But as we learned more about Saddam's crimes, and Democrats grew less convinced that the war was right and was necessary, their response took on a far more sinister color. It started to resemble the Holocaust Shrug."
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Winston Churchill, Oct. 8, 1940 - quoted here in relation to the war against terror: "Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey, hardship our garment, constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible."
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