* “My office has observed a worrisome and rapid deterioration in the human rights situation.”–Michelle Bachelet, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the governmental crackdown in Nicaragua under President Daniel Ortega, now seeking a fourth consecutive term.
* “America is a funny place, more like a great continuing drama than a country. … We’re an agitated people constantly looking for betterment.”–Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal.
* “What could be more hypocritical and cynical than invoking minority rights in the Senate as a pretext for preventing debate about how to preserve minority rights in the society.”–Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, on the Republican-stymied For the People Act that would have overhauled the electoral system.
* “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”–Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
* “For a representative government to function requires at least two political parties that, while offering competing visions, both occupy the same reality and play by the same rules. This country no longer has that. Rather, it has the Democrats and the Donald Trump Fan Club the Republicans have become.”–Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald.
* “If you think that America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could vote, you have progressophobia.”–Bill Maher of HBO’s Real Time.
* “Americans never speak with one voice on anything. That’s how it’s supposed to be in a vast continental democracy.”–Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch.
* “For many Trump-era Republicans … putting ‘America First’ means liberating Americans from the need to care about what non-Americans think.”–Peter Beinart, City University of New York journalism and political science professor.
* “Even in our uniquely American constitutional system designed to provide protection to political minorities, the current filibuster rules provide excessive power to the minority and undermine the core democratic principle of majority rule.”–Duke University public policy professor David Schanzer.
* “As long as Republicans are able to maintain a system in which they can rely on the politics of white identity, as the Democratic Party once did, their politics will revolve around cruelty, rooted in attempts to legislate their opponents out of existence or to use the state to crush communities associated with them.”–Adam Serwer, author of “The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America.”
* “If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the courts’ power.”–Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
* “Lack of inventory continues to be the overwhelming factor holding back home sales, but falling affordability is simply squeezing some first-time buyers out of the market.”–Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.
* “There’s been a lot of very temporary inflation from a set of quirks related to the economy’s reopening.”–Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, former economic adviser to President Barack Obama.
* “Do students who go to our so-called elite colleges and universities receive a better education than those who go to schools that aren’t so prestigious? This is seldom the case, and often the reverse is true.”–George Leef, National Review
* “We’ll have an army of life savers, year after year, that know what to do.”–Edward Kosiec, founder of Every Second Counts CPR, on a new Florida law that requires school districts to provide one hour of “basic training in first aid,” including CPR, for high school students in ninth and 11th grades.
* “Why are we robbing Peter, the public schools, to pay Paul (charter schools), when Paul is not the most optimal situation?”–School Board Chairwoman Lynn Grady.
* “The people of unincorporated Hillsborough County want attention to roads.”–County Commissioner Stacy White.
* “She’s not standing here because she’s an African-American female. She’s standing here because she’s going to do the best job at leading this department forward.”–Mayor Jane Castor, after the swearing in of Barbara Tripp as the first female fire chief in Tampa’s history.