December 24, 2003
QUOTES OF 2003 - AUGUST
• "Guts, limps, spots, humps, corns, boils, scars, tics: these are marks that distinguish the species." -- Lloyd Evans on British socialists
• "Canadians can't quite believe it: Suddenly, we're interesting." -- Naomi Klein
• "Coming to Baghdad has helped me to confirm in my own mind we did our job properly and that the whole effort was worthwhile." -- Coalition bombing advisor Major Penny Cumming
• "If I had been in the president's place I would not have gotten the chance to resign. I would have been lying in a pool of my own blood, looking up and listening to my wife ask, 'How do you reload this son of a bitch?'." -- Congressman Dick Armey, whose comment was declared "quote of the year" by the SMH’s Peter FitzSimons. Armey spoke those words in 1998
• "What the hell are those vehicles? They look like the footstools you'd stand on so you could reach the running board of a real automobile." -- James Lileks reacts to Chris Textor’s range of possible car purchases
• "Here is my porn collection. Here are my divine sex toys and my lubricants and my leather strappy things and my collection of happy open-minded perversions and my active account at Blowfish.com and my tattoos and piercings and love of massage oil and vibrators and things that go ooooh in the night. Come on over, Mr. Ashcroft, I have something to show you." -- SF Chronicle self-abuser Mark Morford
• "'Whats the matter, Mr squaresville? Am I FREAKIN YOU OUT!?' You certainly would be, dipshit, if it was 1957." -- commentator Amos responds to the above
• "Let's shoot Sharon, Bush, Blair, and Howard instead. We would all be so much better off believe me." -- Mikey F's contribution to The Age's Your Say page
• "Arnold, Arnold." -- chant that greeted Arianna Huffington at the launch of her California governor campaign
• "Buy wiping out Israel and dooming millions of Jews into the sea in one gigantic push, you the Palestinians will Dumbfound Western leaders by collapsing 'Israel' in a couple of days." -- message at the taxpayer-funded Virtual Palestine website
• "Somewhere along the line, the idea took hold that, to be an intellectual, you have to be against it, whatever it is. The intellectual is a negator. Affirmation is not in his or her vocabulary." -- Jean Bethke Elshtain
• "You should remember what was done by Australia and its allies over two years, or do you agree with the aggression against East Timor, that removed it from Indonesia." -- Bali bomber Imam Sumudra. Well, do you, John Pilger?
• "They give me books here and I am held in a clean place. The food is tasty. I want for nothing but freedom. Good people are sat around me." -- Gitmo resident Andrei Bakhitov
• "One time I had a girlfriend dress up as a grateful homeless woman. That was one of the hottest nights of my life." -- Ray Smuckles
• "Despite all our differences, we have to learn to sing the same songs, in tune and in harmony." -- Phillip Adams opposes diversity
• "After a couple of miserable terms, a few of us ambushed the bully and gave him what's what. He sobbed, abdicated power, shook our hands and the playground became a better place." -- pacifist Richard Neville failed to learn from his childhood lesson
• "The negative media portrait of the situation in Iraq doesn't correspond with what I've seen. Indeed, we were treated as liberating heroes when we arrived four months ago, and we continue to enjoy amicable relations with the local populace." -- US Marine John R. Guardino
• "Don't be afraid. Just bring the pen down here, then across here, and he's finished." -- Fuad Hussein assists teachers crossing out images of Saddam in Iraqi schoolbooks
• "A public already panicked by the war on terror will be conned and wedged into a debate that we don't need to have – and shouldn't be having." -- Phillip Adams opposes free speech
• "In Iraq, we can just kill the bastards." -- Ralph Peters explains the benefits of fighting terrorism abroad, rather than at home
• "I now have second thoughts about opposing the death penalty for terrorists. Why should taxpayers pay for the rent, meals, electricity bills and medical care of a convicted terrorist who kills, maims, destroys and takes away the lives of the innocent?" -- East Timorese foreign minister Jose Ramos-Horta
• "Now that rebels are bombing the UN, water mains and oilfields belonging to the Iraqi people, where are all the human shields from Western countries who volunteered to sit on these structures to protect them from the evil Americans?" -- Peter Kennedy, in a letter to The Australian
• "The Herald is one of only a few news organisations to have interviewed members of the resistance." -- Paul McGeough finds a new word for "Ba’athist scum and their death-dealing fundamentalist pals"
• "Education and research are the 'twin-carburettors' of economic expansion." -- Labor’s Mark Latham hasn’t looked under a bonnet for decades
• "That would be the worst tragedy in the history of California." -- Cybill Shepherd looks forward to Arnie’s election
• "Other than the bombs they strap to their chests, I’ve got no idea what makes the Palestinians tick." -- Dennis Miller
• "The Huntington thesis seems to have been remarkably prescient in the light of recent world events." -- extract from the newspaper piece that got ABC presenter Stephen Crittenden suspended
• "These terrorists killed the wrong people. They killed the good people." -- incoming Tasmanian governor Richard Butler, following the bomb attack on the UN’s Iraq base
• "I want to thank the Australian people who supported our cause when they demonstrated against the policies of George Bush." -- Bali bomb builder Sawad
• "Four months after the first US tanks rolled into Baghdad airport, the quagmirists are coming out to play again, having learned no lesson when their dire predictions about the second Gulf War proved to be as foolish as the triumphant pronouncements of Comical Ali." -- SMH columnist Miranda Devine
• "As this is written, a Dixie Chick sits in a dark cell, living on peckings, uncertain of her fate, while Janeane Garofalo hasn't been given the opportunity to co-star in a shit film since literally the start of the so-called 'war on terror.'" -- blogger Emily Jones
• "Defeating the Republican Party is not more important than defeating terrorism. Your enemies are those who are trying to kill you. Make the proper distinctions. Get your priorities straight." -- blogger Michael Totten
• "He saved us from Saddam and that's why we named our son after him." -- Iraqi Nadia Jergis Mohammed following the birth of George Bush Abdul Kader Faris Abed El-Hussein
• "Frankly, I don't give a toss what some murderer thinks of my opinions and I'm not particularly inclined to adjust my behaviour according whatever twisted logic such a sicko comes up with. I don't need to ‘bear in mind’ anything terrorists say." -- blogger Tim Dunlop, a few months after writing that we should "consider what role our actions might have played"
Posted by Tim Blair at December 24, 2003 02:36 PM