* “To understand what revolutions and popular democracy are likely to produce, we need to understand the fires in the minds of the men who create or capture those revolutions. And neither Africa nor Arabia offers much in the way of hope.”–Patrick Buchanan, Creators Syndicate.
* “It becomes clearer every week that our country faces a big choice: We can either have a hard decade or a bad century. We can either roll up our sleeves and do what’s needed to overcome our post-Cold War excesses and adapt to the demands of the 21st century or we can just keep limping into the future.”–Thomas
Friedman, New York Times
* “Class warfare isn’t leadership.”–House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on President Barack Obama’s demand that the richest Americans pay higher taxes to help cut soaring U.S. deficits by more than $3 trillion.
* “This is not class warfare. It’s math.”–President Barack Obama.
* “What is killing the economy is lack of credit. In the aftermath of an asset bubble, invariably the result of too-loose credit, banks don’t just tighten their standards; they practically shut down. This was true during the Great Depression, and it’s been true during the Great Recession. And until normal credit standards return, economic growth will continue to be stunted.”–Joe Nocera, New York Times.
* “The threat to democracy today is not the size of government but rather the hidden form that so much of its growth has taken. If those who assume government has never helped them could see how it has, it might help defuse our polarized political climate and reinvigorate informed citizenship.”–Suzanne
Mettler, professor of government, Cornell University.
* “I think the Tea Party’s views are so outside of the mainstream that they would never be embraced by moderates, which the majority of Americans are.”–Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.
* “I messed up.”–Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on his less-than-seamless communication of the company’s price changes.
* “It’s just interesting we won’t take money for high-speed rail, we won’t take money for our seniors to keep them home instead of in nursing homes, but we’re going to ask the federal government to write a check for the Republican convention.”–State Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey.
* “Gov. Scott certainly has a long way to go till he can see the break-even point, but his ratings that dropped to awful are now just bad.”–Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
* “Today, unfortunately, many in the media would like nothing better than to ridicule Christians.”–Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll in addressing the
Faith & Freedom Coalition event that kicked off Presidency 5.
* “Gun owners will be the difference in 2012. The lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution.”–Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the NRA, speaking at a Presidency 5 event.
* “Don’t roll your eyes at me.”–Tampa Port Authority member (and Hillsborough County Commissioner) Sandra Murman to Authority Board Chairman Larry Shipp during a testy exchange involving the tenure of Port Authority Director Richard Waino.
* “My attitude is it doesn’t matter where they land, we just want them here.”–Hillsborough County Commission Chairman Al Higginbotham on the pledge of Time Warner to bring 500 jobs to a site in unincorporated Hillsborough, Tampa or Temple Terrace.
* “We are absolutely committed to not talking about where the stadium goes.”–Jeff Hearn, a Raymond James senior vice president and chairman of the finance structure committee of the Baseball Stadium Financing Caucus, a joint effort of the chambers of commerce of Tampa and St. Petersburg.
* “It looks like the mother ship landed.”–Description of The Pier in St. Petersburg by Adriaan Geuze, one of the three architect finalists in the redesign of the St. Pete landmark.
* “A pyramid, upside down in the water. That’s an example of something that’s surreal.”–Description of The Pier by another redesign finalist, Bjarke Ingels.