April 28, 2003

Quotes of the Week

"Iraq needs only four people to achieve post-Saddam success. Unfortunately they are George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall" - George Will, (at Townhall)

"Civilization's artifacts belong not to the real estate on which they were found but to the civilization they underpin. One day Iraq will be part of that civilized world: It will have not only a museum worthy of its past, but a present reality worthy of it, too. The desecration of Mesopotamia's legacy took place not in the last 10 days but in the last four decades. Baghdad's citizens merely helped themselves to the few things that were left, whether office furniture or potsherds. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance." - Mark Steyn, (in National Post)

Brian Anderson, Cleveland Indians pitcher, after he and teammate Carl Sadler chased down and apprehended a purse-snatcher they observed while dining in an Oakland restaurant..... "The cops said 99 out of 100 times, if people see that a purse is being stolen, they just let it go, but this kid picked the wrong restaurant, where there happened to be a couple of athletes on a losing streak waiting for somebody to take it out on.''

"If this narrow victory escapes critical analysis, we will have wasted the unusual combination of prudence and daring in this nation, which thinks best when it thinks as it was born, a David to Goliaths. Every war that we cannot avoid we should fight as if our survival depends on it, for eventually it will, and never should we be confident that we will prevail, or someday we will not." - Mark Helprin (in National Review)

"I read today that Al Gore wanted to go visit the troops in Baghdad, but he cancelled when he saw what they do to statues over there." - Jay Leno

The Sunday Telegraph discovered documents in the trashed offices of the Iraqi intelligence service that showed a clear link between Saddam and al Qaeda. The story so disturbed the BBC World Service that they dispatched the grotesque Judy Swallow, their very best anti-American sneer merchant, to suggest to her listeners that just maybe the Telegraph was making all this stuff up. But Swallow's guest, one of the BBC's peculiar "analysts", refused to go that far. (As practitioners of unbiased journalism, all of the World Service's presenters suck, but none so much as Swallow). - Denis Boyles, European journalist (at NRO)

Posted by dan at April 28, 2003 12:45 PM