September 2011

September 1, 2011

“With a weak and rotting core, you don’t have much of a foreign policy. You’re discounted at the negotiating table, economically and militarily. So when people ask what’s the best course of action for the U.S.–China relationship, I can give you ten academic responses. But the reality is we need to rebuild our core.”

- Former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, Vogue, Aug. 18, 2011

September 2, 2011

“The election of 2008 was a major down payment on Dr. King’s dream, but it did not fulfill it.”

– Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), op-ed in the Washington Post, Aug. 26, 2011

September 3, 2011

“Great nations have always done great things. When they stop trying, they stop being great.”

– Phil Kadner, Chicago Sun-Times, on budget cuts to science programs, Jul. 10, 2011

September 4, 2011

“That feeling can create its own reality.”

– Warren Buffett, on Americans’ sense of hopelessness, New York Times, Aug. 15, 2011

September 5, 2011

“We celebrate Labor Day to remember the contributions of worker activists in the past, and how they changed the lives of working people, but also to remind ourselves that today’s battles are as important as any we have ever fought.”

– Stuart Appelbaum, labor leader, Huffington Post, Sept. 2, 2011

September 6, 2011

“We’re not going to cost-cut our way to prosperity or to greatness in this business.”

– Doug Ray, Chairman, Publisher and CEO of Paddock Publications, on newspapers being unable to keep giving content away for free, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 4, 2011

September 7, 2011

“Washington is a sandbox full of petulant children who don’t play well together.”

– David Rothkopf, former official in the Clinton Administration, Time, Sept. 1, 2011

September 8, 2011

“Obama campaigned big, but he’s governing small.”

– Larry Hanley, Amalgamated Transit Union president, in a statement to the Associated Press, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 4, 2011

September 9, 2011

“Every known impediment to the legislative process – special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion – are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech.”

– Columnist Jonathan Chair of The New Republic, as quoted by Fareed Zakaria, Time, Aug. 22, 2011

September 10, 2011

“We found enough fat in the Defense Department to send a truck of potato chips to the obese.”

– Former Sen. Alan Simpson, co-chair of the deficit-reduction commission, on the U.S. defense budget, Time, Aug. 8, 2011

September 11, 2011

“The lost opportunities of the years since September 11 are the stuff of tragedy.”

- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in remarks to the Senate Council on Foreign Relations, Oct. 31, 2006

September 12, 2011

“Love and remembrance: such is the legacy of September 11 and its aftermath. It is the same legacy, in fact, as Good Friday — a day of death that ultimately affirmed life.”

- Historian and author Jon Meacham, speaking at a special remembrance ceremony at Saint Thomas Church in New York City, Sept. 11, 2011

September 13, 2011

“These are difficult years for our country. But we are Americans. We are tougher than the times we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been. So let’s meet the moment.”

- President Barack Obama, speech to joint session of Congress, Sept. 8, 2011

September 14, 2011

“The United States has thrived as an open society, a principled nation, and a global leader. We cannot afford to live in fear, sacrifice our values, or pull back from the world.”

- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on the threat of terrorism, speaking at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, Sept. 9, 2011

September 15, 2011

“We have relearned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we’re most prepared or most inclined.”

- Gen. David Petraeus, speaking at his retirement ceremony at Fort Myer in Virginia, Sept. 1, 2011

September 16, 2011

“Fanatical voices tend to get heard the most, and they squelch or silence those that are looking for a way to come together. But peace work is done at a micro level, one to one.”

- Rabbi Peter H. Schweitzer, of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, New York Times, Sept. 10, 2011

September 17, 2011

“Ascribing the evil acts of a few individuals to an entire community is wrong; it is ineffective, and it risks making our country less secure.”

- Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), testifying at a House hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims, Mar. 10, 2011

September 18, 2011

“The idea that the West must at times be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism is the best hope for a 21st century less cruel than the 20th.”

- Columnist Roger Cohen, New York Times, Aug. 30, 2011

September 19, 2011

“There is never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan.”

- President Bill Clinton, in a press conference at the White House, Dec. 10, 2010

September 20, 2011

“I always had a philosophy, it was an old coaching philosophy that I had, if the coach was in the headlines every week, the team’s in trouble. If the team’s in the headlines every week, you’re ok.”

– Former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Politico, Jul. 29, 2011

September 21, 2011

“…Poverty in America today leads not only to anxiety, unhappiness, discomfort and a lack of material goods. It leads to death. Poverty in America today is a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people.”

– Senator Bernie Sanders, Huffington Post, September 13, 2011

September 22, 2011

“Why did I risk it? For God, for tasting freedom, for our land, for liberty, for the future.”

- Fawzia al-Dali, Female Libyan rebel fighter, The New York Times, Sept. 12, 2011

September 23, 2011

“We believe strongly that the road to peace and two states living side by side does not go through New York, it goes through Jerusalem and Ramallah.”

- Hilary Clinton on Palestine’s application for full membership to the United Nations, September 16th, 2011

September 24, 2011

“What defeats a sitting President isn’t a crisis but a sense of paralysis.”

- Deepak Chopra, The Huffington Post, Nov. 14, 2010

September 25, 2011

“The battle front is not between Muslims and non-Muslims. The real battle front is between moderates on all sides of all the faith traditions and the radicals on all sides. The radicals actually feed off each other. And in some kind of existential way, need each other.”

– Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf on Larry King Live, CNN, September 8, 2010

September 26, 2011

“The death penalty is a barbaric anachronism, a crude instrument not of justice but of revenge. Most countries banished it long ago. This country should banish it now.”

– Columnist Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2011

September 27, 2011

“Peace depends upon compromise among peoples who must live together long after our speeches are over, and our votes have been counted.”

– President Barack Obama, on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, speaking at a meeting of the UN General Assembly, Sept. 21, 2011

September 28, 2011

“The more I read the papers the more I’m convinced that ‘we the people’ are having an economic crisis and ‘you the politicians’ are having an election — and there is frighteningly little overlap between the two.”

– Columnist Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Sept. 24, 2011

September 29, 2011

“…[O]ur man of the year is a woman.”

– Nizan Guanaes, CEO of Grupo ABC, Brazil’s largest marketing-services company, on Brazil having elected its first female president, Newsweek, Sept. 26, 2011

September 30, 2011

“Obama needs to take a cue from the way even top-level politicians communicate in Parliament debates in the United Kingdom: a feisty, often almost heckling style of debate and address in which words and phraseology are wielded as weapons.”

– John McWhorter, political commentator, The Root, Sep. 21, 2011