For every one of our 200 or so issues, we've featured one--or more--Quotes of the Week. Most of 'em have been pretty good. Here are a few subjectively picked highlights...(All descriptions appeared in the issue in which they originally ran.)

9-10-96: "I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat, and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy, and trusted at home."--Archibald Cox, former Nixon cabinet member 9-17-96: "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."--Thomas Jefferson 9-24-96: "They that can give us essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."--Benjamin Franklin 10-1-96: "Beware of the newspapers. They will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing."--Malcolm X 10-8-96: "I don't fuck with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future."--Patti Smith 10-22-96: "Unfortunately, we can't do what we would have done 20 years ago and knock the crap out of them...Sometimes, I miss those days."--SPD Capt. Bryant, commander of the North Precinct, responding in a meeting with University District merchants to complaints about youth loitering on public sidewalks on the Ave. 10-29-96: "I hate Dole. I hate Clinton...It's like trying to choose your favorite Menendez brother."--Joan Rivers 11-5-96: "A liberal is someone who will lynch you from a lower branch."- -Mort Sahl 11-26-96: "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it, than vote for something I don't want and get it."--Eugene Debs 12-31-96: "Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."-- Francis of Assisi 1-7-97: "There's no atrocity that's been carried out that hasn't been described as humanitarian and beneficial to its victims."--Noam Chomsky 2-4-97: "This is the essence of democracy. You send in the planes and drop the bombs. Then you gather the journalists and tell them to applaud. We need to study that."--Russian strongman Aleksandr Lebed, commenting on U.S. air strikes on Iraq in 9-96. 2-18-97: "Everywhere I went in Europe I could attend a protest against McDonald's. I thought that was convenient."--San Francisco Food Not Bombs co- founder Keith McHenry 3-4-97: "Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."--Cree Indian prophecy 3-18-97: "My counsel tells me there is no controlling legal authority that says there was any violation of any law."--Al Gore, who used this phrase no less than seven times during a March 3 statement on campaign finance allegations. If Gore really wants to become President in four years, he should learn to take up shorter, pithier phrases, like: "I am not a crook." 4-1-97: "I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."--J. Edgar Hoover 4-22-97: "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."--Edward Abbey 5-20-97: "How can it be the national pastime if only men play it."-- Mariah Burton Nelson, author of the outstanding book The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football 5-27-97: "Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts."--Wendell Berry, The Man Farmer Liberation Front 6-17-97: "A more draconian stricture (of) lawful union activity is scarcely imaginable."--Hearing Examiner for the Public Employment Relations Commission, in ruling that Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran has been harassing employees negotiating a union contract. 7-1-97: "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?...There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."--Frederick Douglass 7-8-97: "Bill Clinton does not have the moral fiber to be a mass murderer."--Henry Kissinger 8-12-97: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can hve great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few; but we can't have both."--Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1916-1939 9-2-97: "When I dare to be powerful; to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."-- Audre Lorde 9-16-97: "When it shall be said in any country in the world, `My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets empty of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive'--when these things can be said then may that country boast of its constitution and government."--Thomas Paine 10-7-97: "We will no longer be led by that half of the population whose socialization, through toys, games, values, and expectations, sanctions violence as the final assertion of manhood, synonymous with nationhood."-- Wilma Scott Heide 10-28-97: "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination."--Eugene Debs 2-10-98: "[He's] sharp as a penny."--U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn, trying to praise newly-fired KVI right wing radio personality John Carlson. 2-17-98: "The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."--G.K. Chesterton 2-17-98: "I find it astounding in the last decade of the 20th century that there should be governments that claim the right to be able to wrong other people and to do so with impunity."--Sen. Slade Gorton, 3-12-98, promoting his bill which attacks Native American tribal sovereignty rights-- apparently oblivious to his having described the entire body of U.S. foreign policy. 4-7-98: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."--Pablo Picasso 4-14-98: "Let them march all they want, so long as they continue to pay their taxes."--Gen. Alexander Haig, in response to the early '80s anti- nuclear movement 4-21-98: "Too much democracy leads to homosexuality, moral decay, racial intolerance, economic deline, single-parent families and a lax work ethic."-- Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad 4-28-98: "...[A woman is like] a rose--you water it and keep it at home for yourself to look at and smell. It is not supposed to be taken out of the house to be smelled."--Syed Ghiasuddin, the Taliban's education minister 6-9-98: "If we hadn't lost the Civil War, we wouldn't have had to deal with this crap."--Pres. Bill Clinton, speaking to a group of Southern Democrats on the subject of affirmative action. 7-22-98: "Work makes you free."--James A. Turner, New York City's Workfare Commissioner, 6-25-98, apparently unaware that the German version of his laudatory remark, "Arbeit macht frei," was printed on the gates of Auschwitz and numerous other Nazi concentration camps, where thousands were forced into slave labor before being exterminated during WWII. 11-18-98: "They know we own their country. We own their airspace...We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there is a lot of oil out there we need."--Air Force Brig. Gen. William Looney, head of the Central Command's Airborne Expeditionary Force (which directs operations keeping Iraqi troops from flying south of the 32nd parallel), worries aloud about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in a recent interview in Defense Week. 12-9-98: "Important signs of drug use in children: Excessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, environmental issues, etc."--from "How Parents Can Help Children Live Drug Free," published last year by Gerald Smith, Director of the Criminology program at the Univ. of Utah, and others (with a foreward by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-UT. 2-10-99: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."--Thomas Jefferson 2-17-99: "The reason to have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars...it's not a jobs program."--Former Sec. of Defense Richard Cheney 4-7-99: "The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss."-- Noam Chomsky, analyzing the extralegal U.S.-led war against Serbia. 4-7-99: "Everything that we tried to achieve for the past several years was annihilated after the bombing began."--A Serbian peace movement activist, via e-mail 4-28-99: "We...have to take this moment once again to hammer home to all the children of America that violence is wrong."--Pres. Bill Clinton, taking time out from his daily regimen of bombing Serbia back to the stone age to comment (with a violent metaphor--"hammer"--no less) on the school shootings in Colorado April 20. 5-26-99: "The United States took its familiar free-market plea to Asia, urging the crisis-hit region to stick with reform despite signs of recovery."--an unintentionally revealing snippet from a 5-17-99 Reuters report. 12-22-99: "Two thirds of poll respondents who earn more than $60,000 a year said using tear gas [against WTO protesters] was appropriate, while only 43 percent of those earning less than $20,000 a year agreed."--Seattle Times, 12-19-99 p. A23. 4-12-00: "The discipline and restraint showed by officers...demonstrated the high quality, strength, and training of our regional law enforcement officers." --The Seattle Police Department After Action Report [on the] World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference 4-26-00: "In South Africa, our vision was to make education free, but the World Bank came with this idea that the user must pay, so schools are being forced to charge. This year, due to budget constraints, the government stopped funding kindergarten."--Trevor Ngwane, Representative of Soweto in the Town Council of Johannesburg. 6-28-00: "If you can't say 'FUCK,' you can't say 'FUCK THE GOVERNMENT.'" --Lenny Bruce 8-2-00: "Once you accept your own death all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically--to promote a cause you believe in."--Saul Alinsky 8-30-00: "By the time you run for president, you've been bought and sold so many times, you don't even know your own name."--Gore Vidal 8-30-00: "I stand here tonight as my own man."--Al, um...Gore 9-13-00: "All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent."--David Brower 9-27-00: "Most middle class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal."--Dr. Benjamin Spock 11-8-00: "Al Gore's soul"--E-Bay Auction item #479162197 11-22-00: "There are still places where people think the function of the media is to provide information."--Dan Rottenberg, White House Spokesperson 12-6-00: "A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it."--Mark Twain 1-3-01: "It was obvious from the start of this doomed 2000 election that nobody in America except a few rich people gave a damn about who won...That's why this wretched election ended in a tie. A million consecutive coin-flips will give you a 50-50 split every time."--Hunter S. Thompson 3-28-01: "Suppress the dreamer, and the world will deteriorate toward barbarism. Despised, impoverished, the dreamer opens the way for his people, sowing, sowing, sowing the seeds which will be harvested, not by him, but by the practical men, the sensible cold heads of tomorrow, who will laugh at the sight of another indefatigable dreamer seeding, seeding, seeding."--Ricardo Flores Magon 4-11-01: "Please don't send me any further requests for support. You've got Mr. Moneybags now."--an irate KCMU subscriber, e-mailing the station to cancel their support for the new KEXP. 4-25-01: "Not everyone is afraid, and not every voice can be silenced...If the way seems difficult, it cannot be abandoned. When any of us is stopped, ten others can take his or her place. That is the genuine hallmark of our struggle, and neither censorship nor base complicity with it can prevent its success."--Edward Said 5-9-01: "A lot of these people are strong people, and a lot of what they are struggling with is not having control...it's important for people nervous about returning [to the earthquake-damaged Olympia capitol building] to pamper themselves."--Lindsay Schutter, "a crisis-intervention specialist with South Sound Mental Health Services," which is, at taxpayer expense, "doing group and individual counseling" with state legislators and staff traumatized by the Nisqually earthquake. Perhaps what they need is to not have control more regularly... 7-11-01: "Perhaps the phrase 'fair world order' better sums up what we should strive for. It recognizes that we live in a society, not a marketplace. It admits of concepts of justice and human solidarity. It acknowledges that, while not everyone will live in the same way, we are all entitled to dignity and decency."--Bertie Ahren, Prime Minister of Ireland, at the UN Millennium Summit, September 6, 2000 7-25-01: "They had come in to the rooms where people were sleeping. Everybody had raised up their hands, calling out `pacifisti! Pacifisti!' And they had beaten the shit out of every person there. There's no pretty way to say it. We went into the other building; there was blood at every sleeping spot, pools of it in some places..." --Starhawk, 7-21-01 in Genoa, Italy, describing one of the countless scenes of unprovoked, brutal police and paramilitary attacks on G8 protesters. 8-19-97: "One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself."--Proust