Remorse

True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.

-- Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)

Innovative Products

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

-- Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain in the September/October 2008 issue of "Contingencies", the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries

Review NOT

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

-- From the draft bill authorizing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to spend ~$700,000,000,000 in tax money to purchase toxic debt from ailing financial institutions

Ghosts

The new stadium is beautiful, but I don't know if the ghosts are going to be there. You can feel that, standing here -- Babe Ruth, DiMaggio. It's not going to be the same.

-- Alex Alicea, Yankees fan from Union City, NJ, on the last game played at Yankee Stadium, New York Times, 22 September 2008

Savor It

The truth is, I'm still not fully conscious of what I have achieved. Perhaps with the passage of time, I'll be able to savor it.

-- Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador, on winning the 2008 Vuelta a Espana (Tour of Spain), rounding out his record 15-month sweep of the three Grand Tours, the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, and Vuelta a Espana

Old Fashioned

We make money the old fashioned way. We print it.

-- Art Rolnick, former Chief Economist, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank

Insulting

She doesn't have any foreign policy credentials. You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don't know what you can say. You can't say anything. ... I think it's a stretch to, in any way, to say that she's got the experience to be president of the United States. I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, "I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia." That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.

-- Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel on Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, Omaha World-Herald, 18 September 2008

Constitution Day

The disdain and uncooperative nature that this administration has shown toward Congress is so egregious that I can no longer assume that it is simply bureaucratic incompetence or isolated mistakes. Rather, I have come to the sad conclusion that this administration has intentionally obstructed Congress' rightful and constitutional duties.

This administration is setting a terrible precedent. What people have to understand is when there is a liberal Democrat in the White House, the President will have set [the precedent] that Members of Congress can simply be dismissed, and that when they are trying to do a congressional investigation need not be cooperated with, in fact, can be obstructed. Is that the type of President that we want? Is that acceptable? It shouldn't be acceptable to Democrats and it shouldn't be acceptable to Republicans.

It is truly with a heavy heart, Madam Speaker, that I stand here reciting example after example of the maliciousness and condescending attitude exhibited by this administration. It is a problem that's flowing from the top. When I hear my friends on the other side of the aisle accusing this administration of stonewalling, of coverups, or thwarting investigations, I sadly must concur with them.

-- Representative Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA), 26 February 2008


Happy Constitution Day, September 17, the day the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787.

Big Hand

The ocean rose up like a big hand and just went right through our house.

-- Deeann Sherman, who was trapped on Bolivar Peninsula in Texas by Hurricane Ike, New York Times, 16 September 2008

Musical Chairs

Investors are like hyperactive first graders playing musical chairs.

-- Sam Stovall, of Standard & Poor's Equity Research, on a downward spiral affecting the shares of financial companies, New York Times, 14 September 2008

Newspapers

A newspaper is not just for reporting the news, it's to get people mad enough to do something about it.

-- Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), American writer and humorist

Procedure Is Everything

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

-- Thomas Sowell (30 June 1930-), American economist, political writer, and commentator

LHC Day 1

Don't cross the streams.

-- Harold Ramis as Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters, 1984

--

You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second.

-- CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the LHC Grid project, a network of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other

--

If you can read this, then the Large Hadron Collider did not create any earth-consuming black holes today.

Corporations

Corporations have been enthroned. An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people ... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Likely Very Expensive

Today's necessary but likely very expensive action for taxpayers is the consequence of regulatory neglect and of a broader political system's reluctance to take on what should have been clearly seen as festering problems.

-- Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, on the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, New York Times, 8 September 2008

Whose Problem?

If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

-- J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) American industrialist

We Often Borrow

We often borrow from our tomorrows to pay our debts to our yesterdays.

-- Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) [Sand and Foam]

Rivet Their Chains

If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Too Easy A Disguise

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be "American" before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism!

-- Edith Wharton

Surreal

When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal.

-- Lawrence J. Ellison (born 1944), CEO and founder, Oracle Corporation, from Smithsonian Institution Oral and Visual Histories


Java Developer's Journal (28 August 2008) adds: Technology's highest paid CEO currently is also America's highest paid CEO, namely Larry Ellison of Oracle - who with a fiscal 2008 pay package of $84.6M is the top earner at any of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies. Noting that annual pay totals are "based on salary, bonuses, incentives and perks," the Associated Press reports that Ellison's pay in 2008 was 38% higher than the $61.2M pay package he received in 2007.