A sampler of quotations on issues large and small currently in the news. . . Bill Gates of Microsoft and Paul Otellini of Intel, on whether the era of the PC is over: "Early next year, the number of computers in use around the world that are connected to the World Wide Web will pass the 1 billion mark. More than 250 million PCs will ship this year alone. Last year, laptops based on Intel Centrino mobile processors and Microsoft Windows XP outsold the highly popular iPod. Not only is the PC alive and well, but it continues to expand its global reach, delivering new capabilities, more choices, and more opportunities to more and more people every single day, in every part of the world." XXX President Bush, at West Point: "We will never back down (to terrorism), we will never give in, and we will never accept anything other than complete victory." XXX Vice President Dick Cheney, at the Naval Academy, on government monitoring of telephone calls involving terrorists: "If people in the United States are communicating with al-Qaida, they are talking to the enemy - and we need to know about it." And: "The president will not relent in the effort to track the enemies of the United States with every legitimate tool in his command. This is not a war we can win on the defensive. Our only option against these enemies is to monitor them, to find them, to fight them and to destroy them." And: "We are talking about international communications, one end of which we have reason to believe is related to al-Qaida or to terrorist networks. It's hard to think of any category of information that could be more important to the safety of the United States." XXX "The Washington Post's" Guy Gugliotta, on efforts to trace the national and genetic origins of Christopher Columbus: "The goal is to determine once and for all whether Columbus, as traditionalists hold, was the son of Genoese wool weaver Domenico Colombo, or was instead a Spaniard named Colon; or Catalan Colom, from Barcelona; or a French Coulom or Colomb; or perhaps Corsican or Mallorcan." XXX A pamphlet handed out during a Marseille, France, open house at the headquarters of Opus Dei, depicted in "The Da Vinci Code" as a conspiratorial and deadly sect: Opus Dei "has no monks, no murders, no masochism, and no misogyny." XXX Continued... |