One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.           –Klaus Kinski

I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary [Clinton]. If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me.
          –Wendy Vitter, wife of Sen. David Vitter, who was later found to be patronizing escort services

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
          –Mark Twain

I wanted to sit on a jury once, but I was taken off the jury; the judge said to me, "Can you tell the truth? Can you be fair?", and I said "That's what journalists do," and everyone in the courtroom laughed. It was the most hurtful moment, I think, I've ever had!
          –Diane Sawyer, ABC News, July 16, 2007

This is a battle of the vodka belt against the wine belt. In between lies the beer belt, which will get to decide.
          –Finnish MEP Lasse Lehtinen, on the fight over the definition of "vodka", June 18, 2007

I mean, what would happen to the Weather Channel’s ratings if all of a sudden people weren’t scared any more?
          –Sen. James Inhofe, on global warming, January 30, 2007

We do not submit the precious rights of the people to the hazard of a prejudiced and irresponsible political determination, but preserve and protect them by an independent and impartial judicial determination. We do not expose the rights of the weak to the danger of being overcome in the public forum by popular uproar, but protect them in the sanctity of the courtroom, where the still, small voice will not fail to be heard. Any attempt to change this method of procedure is an attempt to put the people again in jeopardy of the impositions and the tyrannies from which the first Continental Congress sought to deliver them. The only position that Americans can take is that they are against all despotism whether it emanate from a monarch, from a parliament, or from a mob.
          –Calvin Coolidge on the anniversary of the First Continental Congress, Philadelphia, September 25, 1924

Cartoonists – any satirists – are mere blowhards at the fringes of the mob, screaming at the crowd to throw the gasoline bombs at the storm troopers. Nobody pays attention to us, really, but we look amusing with our veins popping out. I think it builds confidence for the stragglers in the back.
          –Berkeley Breathed, Salon, June 3, 2007

The Plan B is to make Plan A work.
          –George W. Bush on Iraq, April 23, 2007

You have to ask yourself – the first black man is running for president and nobody's afraid of him because everybody's afraid of Hillary?
          –Dick Morris, Fox News, April 11, 2007 (responding to a poll that said 26% of
            Americans would be scared of Hillary Clinton being elected president)

The problem here in America is not that the country is being run by "elites", it's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer that Monica Goodling just hired to keep her ass out of jail – went to a real law school.
          –Bill Maher, April 13, 2007

Senator [Ted Stevens], your Congressional Quarterly profile quotes you, says that you once described yourself as a "mean, miserable SOB." What makes you miserable?
          –Morning Edition, April 10, 2007

Really, the rule of thumb for Newt [Gingrich] is that 9 times out of 10 he's full of crap, and the 10th time is either misdirection or oversight.
          –Batocchio, on Crooks & Liars, April 5, 2007

Everywhere in Hemiptera literature, he [George Kirkaldy] left a touch of genius and almost complete chaos.
          –Robert Usinger, 1942

Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy; equality, and natural rights; the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government. No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe in any of this.
          –Thomas Fleming, paleoconservative author

If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action.
          –Al Gore on global warming, March 21, 2007

It's possible to be a Republican and not be an idiot.
          –Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, during Al Gore's global warming testimony, March 21, 2007

If, say, the Chinese invaded the United States and liberated us from our administration, I and many others would be happy to be released from the grip of a tyrannical leadership. However, it wouldn't be long before we would be placing roadside bombs and other improvised devices to attack and kill as many of the invaders as we could. They would call us "insurgents" and "the enemy" and "terrorists."
          –Bruce Ishikawa, Boston Globe letter, March 18, 2007

The world is divided into people who think they are right.
          –Peggy Seeger, March 17, 2007

Liberals are trusting and optimistic because they believe people are pretty much like themselves. Conservatives are fearful and hostile for much the same reason.

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot, so...[applause and cheers]...so, kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.
          –Ann Coulter, speech at the American Conservative Union, March 1, 2007

The Governor’s [Rick Perry] action [requiring HPV vaccination]seems to signify that God’s moral law regarding sex outside of marriage can be transgressed without consequence.
          –Rick Scarborough, president of Vision America, February 13, 2007

It appears that Bush is about to accomplish in four years what Iran could not do in its eight-year war with Iraq: That is, establish a pro-Iranian fundamentalist Shi'ite government in Iraq.
          –Joe Dombrowski, in the Boston Globe, February 5, 2007

I quit. I keep writing, “wow. [some rightwing asshole] has just written possibly the stupidest thing in the history of the Internet” and then some other rightwing asshole picks up the gauntlet, brushes it off, sticks it up his ass and declares, “Oh yeah?”
          –Jay B., on the Sadly, No! blog, January 30, 2007

All you need to know about U.S. policy in Iraq.

It is tough to be in the minority, isn't it? I feel your pain.
          –House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to Republicans, January 26, 2007

'Twas brillig, and the slithy 30s ribosome did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy was mRNA, that colored message unit array
Bound they were in the glorious sun by initiation factor one
Initiation factor two went searching for tRNA, who bore the flaccid amino acid
Then as the uffish bonds were formed, the 50s ribosome untamed
Came whiffling through the tulgey grass, and burbled as it came
          –Protein Synthesis: An Epic On The Cellular Level, Stanford University, 1971

I would certainly ask Americans to serve, I would ask them to make other sacrifices, but I’m not sure I would want to raise their taxes just because we’re in a war.
          –John McCain on Political Capital, January 6, 2006
Well said – I’m sure we would all rather face an IED than the IRS.          –Stephen Colbert

Listen to this comment from a high-ranking American official: "It became clear that if we were prepared to stay the course, would could help lay the cornerstone for a diverse and independent region. If we faltered, the forces of chaos would smell victory and decades of strife and aggression would stretch endlessly before use. The choice was clear: we would stay the course, and we shall stay the course." That’s not President Bush speaking; it’s Lyndon Johnson speaking, 40 years ago, ordering a hundred thousand more American soldiers to Vietnam.
          –Sen. Edward Kennedy, National Press Club, January 9, 2006

We need to prove Michelle Malkin really exists and isn't animatronic...no on second thought, lets not prove that.
          –Keith Olbermann, January 5, 2006

War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
          –Karl Kraus, writer (1874-1936)

In the arguments, Justice Scalia said, "I'm not a scientist, I don't want to deal with global warming." I just wish he felt that way about presidential elections.
          –Al Gore (quoted in the Boston Globe, December 2, 2006)

This is a serious, long-term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country....It will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous...I want to suggest to you that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of it it weren’t for the scale of the threat.
          –Newt Gingrich, Loeb First Amendment Dinner, November 29, 2006

What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the way to save America is to destroy America. I will awaken every day of my life thankful that I am not with you in that dark place. And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it, and that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea lurks there, and what a cynical mind; and that you are entitled to do all that thanks to the freedoms you seek to suffocate.
          –Keith Olbermann, responding to Gingrich, November 30, 2006

My No. 1 goal is to not go to jail.
          –incoming Republican Representative Michele Bachmann
            of Minnesota, during freshman orientation for new members
            of Congress (quoted in Boston Globe, November 18, 2006)

No offense, and I know Muslims, I like Muslims, I’ve been to mosques, I have to tell you – I’ve been nervous about this interview, because what I feel like saying is, "Sir, prove to me that you’re not working with our enemies."
          –Glenn Beck of CNN, interviewing Congressman-elect Keith Ellison
            (the first Muslim elected to Congress), November 17, 2006

One lesson is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while. It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful, and that is an ideology of freedom, to overcome an ideology of hate....We’ll succeed unless we quit.
          –George W. Bush, asked if there are lessons to be learned from Vietnam
            November 17, 2006

For good reason, the GOP often is called "the stupid party."
          –Robert Novak, November 13, 2006

The values of the American creed – individuality, liberty, free speech, democracy and at least the aspiration of equality – can be expressed and experienced in San Francisco to an extent that's hard to find elsewhere. San Francisco isn't un-American. America has become less American, with a retreat from civil liberties and, in the White House, suppressive policies and pre-emptive war."
          –Richard DeLeon, professor emeritus of political science at San Francisco
            State University (quoted in AP, November 9, 2006)

The people have spoken – and apparently they’re tired of freedom....Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world. A world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all of your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrants.
          –Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, November 7, 2006

I voted for change, except for me.
          –Senator Hillary Clinton, November 7, 2006

Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big, and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls.
          –Senator Roark, Sin City

Senator Kerry does not support our troops. If he had won the election, there wouldn't be any troops left in Iraq. President Bush, on the other hand, has given our troops an opportunity to fight without end. That's creating jobs. In fact, the president's policies helped create 104 more job openings last month. Now who's stupid, Senator?
          –Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, November 1, 2006

We have a two-party system – the Democratic Party, which is a party of no ideas, and the Republican Party, which is a party of bad ideas.
          –Lewis Black

In a cryptic response to a reporter's question as to whether the United States is winning the [Iraq] war and occupation, [Gen. John] Abizaid said, "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war."
          –Boston Globe, September 23, 2006

As for the Democrats, they will end up in the concentration camps that Halliburton is building for them right now. That's the good news. The bad news is that I will be there with them.
          –DCNataro

Philosophy has questions that can never be answered. Religion has answers that can never be questioned.
          –Anonymous (from Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett)

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
          –Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

I told them [Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, hosts of Crossfire] that I thought their show was hurting America, and uh, they came back at me pretty good, they said that, uh, I wasn't being funny. And I said to them, I know that, but tomorrow I will go back to being funny, and your show will still blow.
          –Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, October 18, 2004

For me this was, and is, and always shall be personal. And anyone who claims that I and others like me are soft, or have forgotten the lessons of what happened here, is at best a grasping, opportunistic dilettante, and at worst an idiot, whether he is a commentator, or a vice-president, or a president.
          –Keith Olbermann, September 11, 2006

George W. Bush is the right man to lead us in the era post- whatever calamity he leads us into next.
          –John Oliver, The Daily Show, September 11, 2006

[Pope] Benedict gently rebuked the German church for putting social service projects and technical assistance to the poor ahead of spreading the Christian message. African bishops, he said, told him all doors were open to them in Germany when they wanted to talk about aid projects, but added they were greeted with reservations when it came to evangelization.
          –AP, September 10, 2006

People often argue that science is merely the modern religion and I think that they have it the wrong way round. Science isn't a modern religion, religion was a primitive attempt at science.
          –Michael: gawds righthand man (on God is for Suckers! blog)

You guys in New York can't get a hole in the ground fixed and it's five years later. So let's be fair.
          –New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, after it was pointed out that debris from
            Hurricane Katrina a year earlier is still on the streets (60 Minutes, August
            27, 2006)

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
          –Bertrand Russell

There's a lot of people, good, decent people saying 'withdraw now.' They're absolutely wrong. . . . We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president. That would be a huge mistake.
          –President Bush, speaking about the Iraqi occupation (quoted in the
            Boston Globe, August 26, 2006)

Kim Gladney, 25, who lives in the apartment complex, said she heard 10 shots ring out. "After the first five, I knew something was wrong," she said as she stood just beyond the police barricades. "It just didn't sound good."
          –AP, August 20, 2006, on a standoff in Dallas

If they [drivers] were trained from infancy to pump gas, *maybe* they could make intelligent decisions when it comes to doing that particular chore.
          –Bill Dressler, New Jersey Gas Retailers Association lobbyist
            discussing the proposal to allow self–serve, on the Daily Show

In other news, we have the answer to a troubling part of the Middle East jigsaw puzzle: how to rebuild Iraq. We ought to drop Halliburton like a skilletful of rattlesnakes and get Hezbollah on the job. Did you ever see a better rebuilding bunch than this Hezbollah? The shooting hadn't even stopped yet when the "Army of God" was hustling around with plywood and duct tape, putting everything back together. And who do they get to pay for it all, but the Arabs. Now that's what I call rebuilding!
          –Molly Ivins, August 17, 2006

Traditional beliefs like every person's right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.
          –New York Times editorial, August 9, 2006

[Desmond] Morris told the Radio Times this year's series [Big Brother 2006] features "an unusually unpleasant bunch of weirdos" united by the fact that they are all "naive egotists".
          –BBC Online, August 7, 2006

"If we didn't believe in miracles, we wouldn't have spent our vacation money to come here," said Sandra Rodrigues of Utah, who with her family has been standing outside the Russell Senate Office Building all week, shouting at senators and displaying signs urging "Stop Same Sex Marriage: It Endorses Masturbation." "If same–sex marriage is endorsed," she explained, "then you're going to have children think it's just another option to have pleasure."
          –Washington Post, June 7, 2006

I stay away from human evolution. It's not a field for gentlemen. Those anthropologists are savage.
          –Farish Jenkins, Harvard professor of paleontology

New Hampshire – is their state slogan 'Live Free or Die'? We're more of a guns, God, gays and gynecology state.
          –Kentucky State Representative Kathy Stein

I have to deal with the [expletive] stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.
          –Gen. Tommy Franks, on Douglas Feith (head of Donald Rumsfeld's
            intelligence operation), from "Plan of Attack"

Every CIA success is a DoD [Department of Defense] failure.
          –Donald Rumsfeld (from "The One Percent Doctrine")

[Klaus] Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements; I don’t see it so much erotic, I see more full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base; I don’t see anything erotic here, I just see fornication, and asphyxiation, and choking, and fighting for survival, and growing, and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery; I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain....It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger; it’s the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of a harmony: it’s the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly-pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery, and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order.
          –film director Werner Herzog, on the jungle (from Burden of Dreams)

Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner:

I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well–known liberal bias.

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side.

Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – fiction!

Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring! If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Scotch":

Most people who come to pay their respects to an ambassador wish really to hear themselves talk. I try not to compete with them by listening too.

Some have always wanted money for what it would buy. Some have wanted it for the power it conferred. Some have wanted it for the prestige it provided. The Scotch wanted it for its own sake.

The agriculture of the Scotch did less for the landscape than most. The architecture, as I have observed, was intrinsically an eyesore. So, in general, were the Scotch.

There is considerable need for a research project to ascertain how much of the flavor once associated with our staple foods was the result of soundly conceived contamination.

The most interesting grounds for exclusion was ignorance. Most societies were reluctant to so label a man; they would more readily call him a sex fiend or a crook. This is because people are wary of the reputation of intellectual arrogance. The Scotch were subject to no such fears....If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was a misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity....

As a small personal footnote, I have never thought the pactice of the Scotch in this respect entirely wrong. As a result I have rarely managed to avoid telling the intellectually obtuse what I feel they ought to know. Even when I have remained silent, I have usually succeeded in conveying an impression. It shows the influence of upbringing. It is not a formula for personal popularity or political success and, for a diplomat, it can complicate relations with the State Department.

As matters are regarded from heaven, the proper vantage point, there must be some merit in people who look after themselves, do not request the impossible and keep to an absolute minimum the number of purely ritualistic and ceremonial petitions.

It was also said that an optimistic entrepreneur had once imported talent with a view to setting up a very small–scale whore house. Since the relative values attached to love and money by the rural Scotch were well known, it is hard to see how he could have expected to make much income.

The effect of alcohol on different races is as remarkable as it is invariable. An Englishman becomes haughty; a Swede sad; an Irishman sentimental; A Russian fraternal; a German melodious. A Scotchman always becomes militant. It was on Saturday night that the Scotch gathered at the McIntyre House to make merry and seek one another's destruction.

In any calling Old Tommy [principal of Dutton High School] would have been counted a man of exceptional ignorance but as an educator he excelled.

Every community must have some form of social conflict. Harmony is praised in principle and by the clergy but faction is what people really enjoy....The important thing is not to avoid such conflict but to guide it on to issues where it does no damage to life and limb or the real income of the community.