For each of our 325 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 (issue #1): "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 (issue #2): "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 (issue #3): "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."--Benjamin Franklin

10-1-96 (issue #4): "Beware of the newspapers. They will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing."--Malcolm X

10-8-96 (issue #5): "I don't fuck with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future."--Patti Smith

11-5-96: "A liberal is someone who will lynch you from a lower branch."- -Mort Sahl

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 US air strikes on Iraq in 9-96.

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

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 have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few; but we can't have both."--Louis Brandeis, US 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

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

3-17-98: "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 US 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 decline, 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 US-led war against Serbia.

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.

7-21-99: "The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppress."--Frederick Douglass

1-19-00: Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it."--Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, future hero of 2001 and probable 2008 presidential candidate, in New York Times, 3-17-94.

2-16-00 "I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime."--Albert Einstein, 1947

6-28-00: "If you can't say 'FUCK,' you can't say 'FUCK THE GOVERNMENT.'" --Lenny Bruce

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

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

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.

9-26-01: "If we can't defend the country for $300 billion a year, we ought to get some new generals."--Col. Merrel McPeak, USAF (Ret.), in congressional testimony, March 2001

11-7-01: "Civilians are getting in the way of our air strikes."--Kerry Sanders, reporting [on the bombing of Afghanistan] on MSNBC, 10-25-01

1-30-02: "Estimated percentage change in the fuel efficiency of an SUV if it flies a small American flag from its antenna: -0.5"--Harper's [Magazine] Index, Feb. 2002

2-13-02: "I want to continue to advocate issues, and I want to make a lot of money doing it."--Tim Eyman (P-I, 2-4-02)

6-5-02: "Do you have blacks, too?"--George W. Bush, to Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in a recent meeting. The statement was witnessed--but not reported--by the White House press corps.... Brazil is home to more blacks than any other country outside Africa.

7-3-02: "I'm just going to be blunt about it and get to the point. Race isn't important.... We're sick and tired of being labeled as racist."--King County Sheriff [and future Congressman] Dave Reichert, in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of a white officer with his own gun by a naked, raving black man.

8-28-02: "You never lose your freedom all at once."--Jimmy Breslin. "There ought to be limits to freedom."--George W. Bush, 5-21-99

9-25-02: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."--White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr., responding to a question as to why the Bush administration had waited until after Labor Day, when public attention began to turn to elections and the 9/11 anniversary, to roll out a plan to aggressively persuade the public that the US needed to immediately attack Iraq.

11-20-02: [If] we don't try...clever diplomacy but just wage total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."--Richard Perle, Bush advisor. "A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality."--John W. Stoner

1-1-03: "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job."--A freedom-defending US official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists, as reported in the Washington Post, 12-25-02

1-15-03: "God loves you and I love you and you can count on us both."--Pres. George W. Bush, while urging war to a Philadelphia audience, 12-14-02, inadvertently demonstrating the danger posed by messianic fundamentalist zealots

4-23-03: "Washington," said an Arab envoy, "needs to wipe that preemptive smirk off its face in a hurry."--"A New Way of Warfare Leaves Behind an Abundance of Loose Ends," New York Times, 4-20-03

6-4-03: "One hundred days of Saddam were better than a day of the Americans."--An Iraqi Shiite Muslim guard, as quoted by Robert Fisk in the UK Independent, 5-31-03

8-13-03: "God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda, and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."--President George W. Bush, sounding remarkably like the guy that a local jury just convicted in less than an hour for murdering his grandmother in cold blood.

8-27-03: "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."--Ben Hecht

10-8-03: "For US soldiers wondering what they should and should not do in their role as occupiers of Iraq, help may be on the way from the Israeli Defense Forces,"--Christian Science Monitor, 9-30-03

10-22-03: "That doesn't mean we wouldn't like to capture more kids."--Seattle School Board member Dick Lilly (while munching on a piece of the gingerbread house installed on his front lawn)

11-5-03: "It was a big mistake to discount the Iraqi resistance. If someone invaded Texas, we'd do the same thing."--Lt. Col. Kim Keslun, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

1-14-04: "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs."--a character in an ad airing in Iowa [that ad was later discovered to have been financed, through a third-party PAC, by competing presidential candidates from the Democratic Party establishment]

5-19-04: "NBC News later quoted US military officials as saying that the [so far] unreleased photographs showed American soldiers "severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and 'acting inappropriately with a dead body.'" The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by US personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys."--Seymour M. Hersh, from "Chain in Command," 5-17-04, the second of his three (thus far) exceptional articles in the New Yorker [since these photos and the video never were released, the most explosive parts of the Abu Ghraib scandal have thus been forgotten, and their perpetrators unpunished]

7-21-04: "Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship [of the media]. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."--Gen. William C. Westmoreland, US military commander, 1982

8-18-04: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."--George W. Bush, Washington, DC, 8-5-04

9-15-04: "(AP) 4:27 PM, 9-8-03 "1000th US Soldier Dies in Iraq." (AP) 4:40 PM, 9-8-04 "Ridge: Terrorists Could Strike Before Election."

10-27-04: "By maintaining an illusion of freedom, volition is lost and subjugation becomes complete."--Voltaire

1-5-05: "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."--Jeanette Rankin

2-2-05: "Global warming is the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state."--Sen. James Inhofe, R-OK, Chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

4-27-05: "If being occasionally tough and aggressive and abrasive were a problem, there are a lot of members of the United States Senate who wouldn't qualify."--Dick Cheney, defending his protege John Bolton by noting that Washington DC is chock full of arrogant assholes

5-25-05: "The so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed...were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."--Rudolf Hoess, the SS commander at Auschwitz

6-22-05: "Here 'the revolution' is anything but a party. Dancing hippies, drum circles, and four-story high puppets are notably absent from the recent mass mobilizations that have rocked Bolivia for the past two weeks. There are no breaks for concerts, no hemp clothing for sale. You are not an individual, but a part of your contingent, and from them you do not stray....Marches here in Bolivia are supreme examples of discipline and seriousness. Rigidity replaces fluidity, unity replaces individualism, rash actions are rare. The marchers have anger and determination in their hearts, but rein that in for the sake of the long-term struggle. Their intensity is in their expressions, chants, and willpower--not in violent behavior."--Jean Friedsky, NarcoNews

12-8-05: "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism"--Headline of one of the US-penned stories the Pentagon paid an Iraqi newspaper to run without identifying either its source or that it was a paid advertisement

12-22-05: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."--Voltaire

3-2-06: "Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."--Karl Marx

3-30-06: "Any American who is prepared to run for President should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."--Gore Vidal

5-11-06: "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."--John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), anticipating George W. Bush

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