EthixBytes
A Collection of Quotes, Comments, Statistics, and News Items

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal, seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
President Franklin Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address.

“These profits are far beyond that which these corporations would normally earn.”
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-S.D., in response to Exxon Mobil’s record third-quarter revenues of $100,720,000,000 and record profit of $9.92 billion, up 75% from last year.

“In my administration, we will ask not only what is legal but what is right, not what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves.”
President George W. Bush in a campaign speech in 1999.

“That would basically allow the CIA to engage in torture.”
Sen. John McCain, in reaction to the Bush administration’s proposal to exempt covert agents from the Senate-approved ban on torturing detainees in U.S. custody.

“In the last five years there has been a profound and radical change in the basic policies and moral values of our country. The insistence by our government that the CIA or others have a right to torture prisoners is one indication of a radical departure from past policies.”
President Jimmy Carter, interviewed on NBC Today in relation to his new book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.

“Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to expose a social disaster.”
Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners..

“The World Bank defines ‘absolute poverty’ as living on less than $1 per day. That encompasses 1.3 billion people—or about 22% of the world’s population.”
Baptist Message, 9/22/05.

“We should do for ourselves collectively through our government the things the market system does not do at all or as well.”
Abraham Lincoln in the Christian Century, 8/9/05.

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. Where no Catholic prelate would tell the President, should he be Catholic, how to act. And no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote. Where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. I believe in an America where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical body.”
President John F. Kennedy to Houston clergy before his election, Faith and Values, 10/30/05.

“We found numerous problems . . . neither the DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing and details on how appropriated funds are being spent.”
Conclusions in a 70-page report (May, 2005) of the Government Accountability Office of $191 billion spent waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas could display the Ten Commandments on its capitol grounds, it actually was ruling on a version of the text which includes 11 commandments—or 12 if you are Jewish . . . . a compromise version to maintain the support of Jews and Christians from various traditions, who don’t divide the commandments the same way.”
Newsweek, 7/11/05.

“The largest federal study of the nation’s sexual practices has revealed that more than half of American teens age 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex, men age 30 to 44 have had a median of 6 to 8 sexual partners in their lifetimes; about 4 percent of men and women described themselves as homosexual, and among both men and women age 15 to 44, about two-thirds have had only one sexual partner in the past year.”
National Center for Health Statistics reported in the Los Angeles Times, 9/16/05.

“One of the most famous 19^th century revivalists, Charles Finney, developed the idea of the ‘altar call’ in order to sign up his converts for the abolition movement.”
Jim Wallis, Sojourners editorial, 10/05.

“I’ve never as a grown-up visited a cemetery without realizing how brief the time we’re here, or how much we crowd into it. I think I do more meditation in a cemetery than a church.”
Bill Moyers, during a wreath-laying ceremony at President Johnson’s grave.

Updated Saturday, January 21, 2006