* “The pain people feel when they look at their buying power must be reduced. … The government’s direction will be to save Iran’s economy … and interact constructively with the world.”–New Iranian President Hasan Rouhani.
* “You left the Egyptians. You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that.”–Egypt’s commanding Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi criticizing the U.S. response to threats of a civil war.
* “Every government has corruption, including ours. But China’s is industrial strength.”–Thomas Friedman, New York Times.
* “There’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don’t think that’s a secret.”–President Barack Obama.
* “One of the least attractive legacies of Barack Obama will be the way he empowered freshman senators to believe they were only one or two good speeches away from the presidency. Right now the show horses of the U.S. Senate are Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. All are preparing for a 2016 presidential bid. … The three of them have an average age of 45 and an average tenure in Washington of 1.9 years. …They’re the ones with the national names, in a party that’s got a crush on crazy.”–Gail Collins, New York Times.
* “The (Rand) Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone.”–Charles Krauthhammer, Washington Post.
* “There is a lot of misunderstanding about what’s collected, why it’s collected and how much is being used.”–Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee, on the need for more information about the NSA’s phone-records surveillance.
* “South Korea today has twice the population of the North and 40 times the GDP. Must we still deploy a U.S. army on the Korean DMZ?”–Patrick J. Buchanan, Creators Syndicate.
* “‘Stand your ground’ splits the country sharply along political, gender and racial lines.”–Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
* “Demands for a special session to repeal the (‘stand your ground’) law disregard the very foundation of our representative democracy by presuming that a law passed by the majority of a constitutional body should be reversed by the objections of the few.”–Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel and speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.
* “Women are great listeners. Men are just a different kind of personality type.”–Robert B. Hirschhorn, jury-selection consultant used by the defense in the George Zimmerman trial.
* “They don’t know diddly-squat. Diddly-squat!”–Oprah Winfrey’s response to what young people today know about the civil rights movement.
* “(Anthony) Weiner is the poster boy for a sub-species of lawmakers who are really noisemakers, maestros of the cable-ready kerfuffle, their sights set on MSNBC or Fox News or Politico, their need for notice constant. He’s a fun house mirror of narcissism in politics … .”–Frank Bruni, New York Times.
* “There are a lot of people who thought he did a good job when he was governor. Everything I hear from my friends in Florida is, he’s going to be very competitive.”–Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Charlie Crist’s chances in a gubernatorial challenge to Rick Scott.
* “They have been entirely deficient up until about six months ago. All the noise was coming from the other side. We have to ramp it up as to the benefits.”–Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., criticizing the Obama Administration’s approach to selling the Affordable Care Act.
* “I don’t think too many people question that there is a strong linkage between improved transportation and improved economic growth. It’s what that mix of transportation options is and how you pay for it–that’s when the conversation gets a little dicier, and those conversations are yet to come.”–Rick Homans, president and CEO of the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp.
* “Are we a major league community? Are we a major league region? I think people have to decide what we are.”–St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster.
* “It doesn’t bother me that we do it. It just needs to be done correctly.”–Hillsborough County school superintendent MaryEllen Elia on grading schools.
* “They need to decide if this is a system of improvement or if this is a system of sledge-hammering. We are at a crossroads.”–Pinellas County school superintendent Mike Grego on the A-F school model.
* “Over the next four to five years, Hillsborough County will experience a rash of new hotel development not seen in this area for the past 15 years.”–Lou Plasencia, founder of The Plasencia Group, a hospitality real estate firm.