quote/unquote (NY's Eve Eddition)

(Quote/unquote is fairly regular feature of The Brazosport News and is compiled by a fellow named Wilson in St. Louis who once worked for The Houston Post, The Riverfront Times and The Houma Courier. He coaches youth basketball and soccer in his spare time and is an avid recycler.)

"Nothing is more frightening than human history."
----motto of Museum of Historic Torture Devices, Wisconsin Dells

"Bruce Bartlett says that 'people are so risk-averse that they are hoarding money, refusing to spend' and that 'tax rebates don't work because people save them.' People are not hoarding cash and refusing to spend. They are not saving. They do not have money to save. They are paying down debt or they are broke. Tax rebates? Mine went into my gas tank."
- Debra Wiley of Inglewood, CA. in a NY Times Letter to the Editor, Dec. 30, '08

"Again, he was drawn compulsively to that which he found loathsome. Television, he could plainly see, would be the death of literacy and the handmaid of instant gratification. It would instill cheap and commercial values and incite the nastiest forms of populism. He fell for it like a ton of bricks. He wallowed exuberantly in its corruption. He was a natural. He was perfectly well aware, as his diaries show, that he was expending his spirit in a waste of shame. But he enjoyed it and excelled at it, and he may have hoped to turn the greatest weapon of crass modernity against itself."
--- Christopher Hitchens, The Weekly Standard, 5.5.03, in a review of "Malcolm Muggeridge: a Biography." (Muggeridge photo, above right)

"There was nothing unusual about how he was taken into custody. He was treated exactly like we treat anybody else."
- Lt. Eric Shuhandler of Gilbert, Arizona, about the DUI arrest last night of Charles Barkley