Quote of the Day:
May 22, 2013
“If you’re scared then you shouldn’t be in politics.”
-Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA), CNN’s State of the Union, 1/16/2011
Our daily quotes are provided by American University's Simpson Fellows who continue the mission of Reverend James B. Simpson's Contemporary Quotations: The Most Notable Quotes From 1950 to the Present
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- Arts & Letters Daily
- Christopher Buckley at The Daily Beast
- CNN Political Ticker
- Daily Kos
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- Electoral Vote Predictor
- Ezra Klein at the Washington Post
- Firedoglake
- First Read
- FiveThirtyEight
- Frank Rich at New York Magazine
- Frum Forum
- Gallup
- History News Network
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- Maureen Dowd at The New York Times
- National Review
- National Review's The Corner
- Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal
- Political Wire
- Politico
- Pollster.com
- PostPolitics
- Rasmussen
- RealClearPolitics
- Roll Call
- Salon
- Slate
- Swampland
- Talking Points Memo
- The Daily Beast
- The Daily Caller
- The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan
- The Daily Show
- The Economist
- The Hill
- The Huffington Post
- The Nation
- The New Republic
- The Weekly Standard
- Wonkette
August 2012
August 1, 2011
“You earn what you learn.”
- Richard W. Fisher, president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, contending that education determines income, The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2011
August 2, 2011
“Just because we followed Greece into democracy does not mean we need to follow them into bankruptcy.”
– Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, speech at the 38th annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Feb. 11, 2011
August 3, 2011
“It would be wise for all Republicans to remember that their team didn’t win, the other team lost. Heading into 2012, voters will remain ready to vote against the party in power unless they are given a reason not to do so.”
- Scott Rasmussen, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 1, 2010
August 5, 2011
“There was a period when the highest goal for Republicans was getting a balanced budget, and if you had to raise taxes, you would do that.”
– John Feehery, former GOP congressional aide, The Washington Post, July 27, 2011
August 6, 2011
“The words we use really do matter because…there’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike.”
- President Bill Clinton, on the impact that political rhetoric has on the public, in a speech at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, April 16, 2010
August 7, 2011
“The entire world has become this Dickensian series in which you are not visited by three ghosts but by eight million ghosts. I feel as if I see things about people that I don’t necessarily want to see, and then its lodged like a piece of corn in my subconscious.”
- Sloane Crosley, author of How Did You Get This Number, as reported in The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2012
August 8, 2011
“Being ladylike does not require silence.”
- Former First Lady Betty Ford, speaking at the International Women’s Year Conference in Cleveland, OH, Oct. 25, 1975
August 9, 2011
“We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility.”
– Billionaire investor George Soros, in an interview before his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on properly understanding the global financial crises, Jan. 25, 2012
August 10, 2011
“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries. I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.”
- Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, The New York Times, Jan. 4, 2012
August 13, 2011
“You are only going to be the size of your dream. To dream big or dream small takes the same amount of energy, so why not stretch a little bit?”
– Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, to students at Stanford Business School circa 2008, reported in Newsweek, July 16, 2012
August 14, 2011
“Science fiction is now science fact.”
- Doug McCuistion, NASA’s Mars exploration program director, on NASA’s upcoming mission to Mars, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 27, 2011
August 15, 2011
“Liberty is precious. But so is life. It should not be so difficult for men and women of good will and good heart and sound mind to find the right balance between the two.”
- Jon Meacham, on gun control, Need to Know, PBS, Jan. 14, 2011
August 16, 2011
“That’s the art of leadership. To make sure that what shouldn’t happen, doesn’t happen.”
- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Newsweek International, Feb. 26, 2007
August 17, 2011
“You can drive yourself crazy trying to peer into a person’s soul–or you can do the sensible thing: ask not what inner motives drive a politician’s policy choices but instead whether those choices are good for the country.”
- Columnist Paul Begala, Newsweek, July 2 & 9, 2012
August 18, 2011
“I don’t want to be someone that they dodge when they see me at the grocery store or church. I’m not going to be doing this forever, and I’m going to go back home. I would rather be respected than reelected.”
- Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), on not enjoying soliciting campaign contributions, Politico, Sept. 28, 2011
August 19, 2011
“Politics play a role in every presidential decision. Trying to remove politics from governing is like trying to remove mathematics from physics–you can’t do it. Math is the language in which physics is expressed. And politics is the language–and the mechanism–through which governing is expressed.”
- Columnist Paul Begala, Newsweek, July 2 & 9, 2012
August 21, 2011
“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.”
- Author Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated, p.145, 2002
August 22, 2011
“One of the most striking elements of today’s threat picture is that plots to attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens.”
- Sec. of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, Feb. 9, 2011
August 23, 2011
“I’ll tell you the worst part about it, for me. It was the look in their eyes when the nurses gave them the diagnosis — H.I.V.-positive — then said there was no treatment. I saw no anger in their expression. No protest. If anything, just a sort of acquiescence.”
- Bono, The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2011
August 24, 2011
“Political insiderdom — or the illusion thereof — has moved from Georgetown salons or cordoned-off security zones to a mass e-mail list administrated by a never-married 45-year-old grind known as Mikey.”
- on the reach of Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook, Mark Leibovich, The New York Times magazine, April 21, 2010
August 27, 2011
“Walking on the moon is now something that people used to do, in the distant past, like macramé, decoupage and the Hustle…. There will just be the pictures, then, as we saw them in the summer of ’69, ghostly and blurry, colorless and incomprehensible, an infant’s glimpse of a new world.”
- Robert Lloyd, reflecting on Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon, LA Times, Aug 26, 2012.
August 28, 2011
“The new people did not come here for a political career, they came here for a cause. This isn’t a budget. This a cause.”
- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), in a press conference on Capitol Hill, April 5, 2011
August 29, 2011
“I love the fact that there are also women out there that don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”
- Ann Romney, speech at Connecticut GOP Prescott Bush Awards dinner in Stamford, Conn., April 23, 2012.
August 30, 2011
“The key variable in determining whether a ‘win is a win’ is expectations. If a candidate does well where he is not supposed to do well, that’s a win. If he doesn’t do well where he’s supposed to do well, that’s a loss. Meanwhile, delegates are won and lost. That’s the rock solid number that will determine the nominee. That is the only number that matters, and yet sometimes it seems it doesn’t matter at all.”
- John Dickerson, Slate, March 2, 2012
August 31, 2011
“The call for revolution sounds weird in good times, but when things are bad, upending the status quo feels irresistible.”
– Shankar Vendantam, Slate.com, Oct. 11, 2010