Verbatim

‘Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow. He’s entitled to his own opinion. He’s not entitled to rewrite history.’

JOE BIDEN, U.S. Vice President, responding to his predecessor’s criticism of the Obama Administration’s handling of the attempted airplane bombing on Christmas Day

‘If you look like me, you may be ejected from Southwest Air.’

KEVIN SMITH, director, in his Twitter feed, after he was kicked off a Feb. 13 flight for being too large

‘I killed someone, once. He was a young chap. He had been my lover, and he got AIDS.’

RAY GOSLING, BBC presenter, in a TV documentary on dying, saying that he euthanized his terminally ill partner “years ago” to relieve his “terrible pain.” Police are investigating the claim

‘We do not want this at all–it is meat makeup.’

JAN BERTOFT, of the Swedish Consumer’s Association, on the European Union’s approval of the use of thrombin, a product that can glue pieces of meat together to make a single slab

‘I offer a sincere apology … We will do our best to stabilize people’s lives.’

KIM YONG IL, Prime Minister of North Korea, reportedly apologizing for a decision to revalue the nation’s currency in November, which in turn wiped out much private wealth

‘To what extent are we just little lemmings that they just throw down a track?’

HANNAH CAMPBELL-PEGG, an Australian luger, calling Vancouver’s Olympic course unsafe just a day before Georgia’s Nodar Kumaritashvili, 21, was killed in a high-speed crash

‘Our modest guide can point you on the road to good music.’

L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO, the Vatican’s official newspaper, naming its top 10 rock albums of all time, including Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and the Beatles’ Revolver

TALKING HEADS

Don Peck

On how an “era of joblessness” will transform America, in the Atlantic:

“There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment–chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. “

–March 2010

Bob Herbert

Discussing how the U.S. lags behind China on energy efficiency, in the New York Times:

“China is a poor country with nothing comparable to the tremendous research, industrial and economic resources that the U.S. has been blessed with. Yet they’re blowing us away … The low-carbon era is coming. We can be dragged into that newer, greener world by leading countries like China; or we can take up the challenge and become the world’s leader ourselves.” –2/13/10

Jeffrey E. Garten

Assessing the federal stimulus package one year later on the

Daily Beast:

“The bottom line: after one year, the economic record is mixed. On the other hand, the political outlook may be more significant … A pessimistic view is that politics will take on a [new] level of viciousness … An optimistic view is that a sudden lurch towards constructive bipartisan politics combined with American resilience, ingenuity and entrepreneurship will pull us out.”

–2/16/10

Sources: NBC; Twitter; BBC; Sweden’s the Local; New York Times; SI.com BeatCrave.com

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