* “Cuba has taken some modest steps towards opening up. Easing up on travel restrictions has been one key area. Cuban authorities can say that it is easier now for Cubans to travel to the U.S. than for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba.”–Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy analysis center.
* “We must ask a question only Muslims can answer: What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every American military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a violent response, and everything Muslim extremists do to other Muslims is ignorable and calls for mostly silence?”–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times.
* “For the moment I’m in favor of maintaining celibacy, with its pros and cons, because there have been 10 centuries of good experiences rather than failures. It’s a question of discipline, not of faith. It could change.”–Pre-Pope opinion of then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
* “There was a time in my life when I wasn’t likely to be found in a library, much less found one.”–Former President George W. Bush at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
* “It’s a great country. There are a lot of great families, and it’s not just four families or whatever. There are other people out there that are very qualified, and we’ve had enough Bushes.”–Barbara Bush commenting on the possibility of son Jeb running for president.
* “The president has kept every promise he’s made. I think he’s done a good job. He kept his word.”–New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on President Obama helping his state recover from Superstorm Sandy.
* “A nation has more in common than geography. It is also common values, a common way of looking at the world–not that everyone agrees on everything always, but that we are at least tethered by similar understanding of who we are and what that means. It is that test this country fails now with regularity.”–Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald.
* “Reporters doing TV news in real time are an oxymoron: You can’t gather news and present it at the same time. Part of news gathering is the gathering part. … Continuous real-time broadcast news is a failed experiment.”–Author James Gleick, New York magazine.
* “Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, emailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.”–Maureen Dowd, New York Times.
* “If your religion embraces ‘jihad,’ references ‘infidels’ and provides the wherewithal to cherry pick context for both, your faith doesn’t deserve a ‘religion-of-peace’ designation.”–Joe O’Neill, La Gaceta.
* “You are a coward, Sen. Rubio. You are afraid to stand up to the gun lobby and to stand up for your constituents.”–Pinecrest (Miami-Dade County) Mayor Cindy Lerner.
* “The U.S. tax code is 74,000 pages long. This is seven times longer than the Bible and double the length of Encyclopedia Britannica.”–U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Lakeland.
* “We could market the Tampa Bay region as the aquarium capital of the world.”–David Yates, Clearwater Marine Aquarium CEO.
* “If we are truly going to be an international destination, then we’ve got to go get the business.”–Mayor Bob Buckhorn on traveling to Germany and Switzerland with a delegation of business recruiters.
* “That economy is hot, they’re buying products, and we’re going to be taking a whole delegation of businesspeople.”–Rick Homans, president and CEO of the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp., on this fall’s trade mission to Brazil.
* “When you make your bets, you make them for the long-term. I happen to think Tampa is a great bet for the long-term.–Bob Abberger, managing director of Trammell Crow Co., the developer of the delayed SouthGate office tower in downtown Tampa.
* “They’re very discriminating, highly-educated, with high disposable income. Those are the ones we think live in the downtown and Channel area that we want to utilize Channelside.”–Punit Shah, one of the Liberty Channelside LLC partners, on why the joint venture signed an agreement to purchase Channelside Bay Plaza’s lease.