Sedulia's Quotations

Mitt Romney actually a softie

Baltimore radio interviewer:

One of the things, Ann Romney, that folks talk about with your husband, Mitt Romney...Sometimes he comes off stiff....

Ann Romney:

Well, you know, I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out because he is not.

Ron Paul on honest rape, versus the other kind, I guess

If it's an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen.....

--Ron Paul, a obstetrician-gynecologist and Republican candidate for the presidential candidacy who is against abortion and wants a law saying human life begins at birth, in a TV interview. By the way, estrogen would not prevent pregnancy in a rape victim.

Alaskan male-to-female ratio: the deal

The odds are pretty good, but the goods are pretty odd.

  --Comment from an Alaskan tour guide on the eligible-male to -female ratio in Alaska, quoted by a commenter on an article in the Wall Street Journal on unnatural boy-girl ratios in Asia

Herman Cain wants to be the world's most powerful man

October 16, 1964. Chinese general Zhang Aiping reporting to Premier Zhou Enlai that the first Chinese atomic bomb was exploded successfully

So yes, they're a military threat. They have indicated that they are trying to develop nuclear capability.

  --U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain on China, which exploded its first nuclear weapons in 1964, in a TV interview on 1 November 2011

Carl Sagan on the American future without science

 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-- when we're a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition.

  --Carl Sagan (1934-1996), astronomer and popularizer of science, in 1994

Patricia Cohen: Most historians study recent history

Historians and other humanities scholars have increasingly restricted their sights to the near present. Three out of four historians, for example, specialize in the post-industrial era or the 20th century, the American Historical Association reports.

  --Patricia Cohen, "Deep History Takes Humanity Back to Its Origins" in the New York Times

Amy Poehler: Ikea is Swedish for "argument"

Graphic by Justin Pollard, John Lloyd and Stevyn Colgan

Amy Poehler once said that IKEA is Swedish for "argument."

  --Lauren Collins, "House Perfect," in the New Yorker, 3 October 2011

Goering: To start a war, just tell people they're under attack and accuse pacifists of lack of patriotism

Of course, ordinary people don't want war [...] But in the end it's the leader of a country who determines its politics, and it is always easy to get the people to go along, whether in a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament, or a Communist dictatorship.... It's quite easy. All you have to do is tell the people that they are under attack, and accuse the pacifists of lack of patriotism and of putting their nation in danger. This method works in every country.

   --Hermann Göring (1893-1946) in an interview with Gustave Gilbert in his prison cell, 18 April 1946. Nürnberger Tagebuch (Nuremberg Diary)  p. 270 (p. 278)

Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land.

Aliens among us

Because of an editing error, an essay on Page 11 this weekend, about the religious beliefs of Republican presidential candidates, misstates the proportion of Americans who believe that extraterrestrials live among us. It is about a third, not a majority.

  --Correction appearing in the NY Times, 28 August 2011

Jeffrey Toobin on the Ivy Supremes

Currently, all nine Justices [of the Supreme Court of the United States] attended law school at either Harvard or Yale.

  --Jeffrey Toobin, "Partners," an article about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the New Yorker