(A Collection of Quotes, Comments, Statistics, and News Items)

 “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried; grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.”   
Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

“Some call me socially dangerous! When did Christianity stop being socially dangerous? When Christianity stops being socially dangerous, it stops being Christianity.” 
Tony Campolo.

“I think it is a mistake to fixate on symbols of the decline of Christian cultural influence rather than the deeper realities these symbols help illuminate . . . . A granite Decalogue monument is a symbol; a million kids victimized by divorce each year is a reality.”       
David P. Gushee, Union University.

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the Roman people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”       
Historian Daniel J. Boorstin observing American support for civil religion. 

“Year by year the tax burden shifts from corporations to individuals: corporate income taxes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product were 1965: 4.1%, 2000: 2.5%, 2002: 1.5%.”  
Sojourners quoting Robert S. McIntyre, Citizens for Tax Justice. 

“Corporate ethics depend on the ethics of the individual. When a corporation claims to value a code of ethics but rewards those who ignore that code, it’s time to leave.” 
Enron Whistleblower Sharon Watkins at Samford University. 

“By no stretch of the imagination was it an honest mistake. Dick Cheney’s claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program [was] the mushroom cloud that scared Congress into ceding its power to wage war.”
CIA analyst Ray McGovern in Sojourners. 

“We had difficulty prying it out of the Pentagon.”       
Stanford University Professor Barton Bernstein’s confirmation of 10 U.S. airmen prisoners killed in the atomic bomb detonation over Hiroshima, which killed 140,000, including thousands of forced labor Koreans and many Americans of Japanese descent trapped there when the war began.

“President Bush’s Council on Economic Advisors predicted Monday [2/9/04] the economy would create 2.6 million new jobs in 2004. Last year’s report predicted 1.7 million jobs, but instead the nation lost 53,000 jobs. In the last three years, 2.2 million jobs have disappeared.”

“We’re spending $900,000 a minute more than we are taking in. It’s utterly ridiculous.”      
Sen. Kent Conrad (ND), ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

“We’ve gone from a war on poverty to a war on the poor.”     
Episcopal Bishop John Chane, on federal policies favoring the wealthy and corporations. 

“Due to state budget cuts, Texas is dead last among states in the percentage of children who have health insurance [and it] reduced services for 158,000 frail, elderly, and disabled Texans [and] cut $41.2 million from the mental health budget. No state can be great if it casts aside its weakest members.”
Texas Comptroller Carole Strayhorn

 “Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get back to putting the rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of its faith in good government.”        
Bill Moyers, SchumannCenter for Media and Democracy Speech, Nov. 8, 2003. 

“Well, my analysis was wrong, and I’m sorry. I am much more skeptical of the Bush administration now than I was at the time.”
Fox News Bill O’Reilly to Charles Gibson about his statement before the war that if no WMD were found, he would apologize to the nation.

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” 
John Kerry to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.

“Since 1950, 10,667 children have been allegedly victimized by 4,392 priests, according to two long-awaited studies, and even these numbers represent an undercount.”      
The New York Times, Feb. 27, 2004.

“It was kind of like how Tyson’s and Pilgrim’s Pride do it.”   
U.S. Senator John Cornyn (TX) commenting on 417 pheasants shot by him, VP Cheney, and a small group in Pennsylvania after gamekeepers released 500 pen-raised pheasants (Dallas Morning News, 12/23/03)

Updated Monday, October 11, 2004