First Posted: 1/23/2015
Quotations in the news from last week:
“I don’t really care who he is. It doesn’t make him any exception. If you’re a racist, you’re always going to be a racist. And for him to want to erase it — I just think it’s wrong.” — Kristyn Atwood, who was among a group of mostly black elementary school students at whom Mark Wahlberg threw rocks and shouted racial epithets in 1986. Wahlberg is now seeking a pardon for his crimes.
___
“Every people deserves to conserve its identity without being ideologically colonized.” — Pope Francis, saying that outside institutions should not impose views on family planning or gay rights onto developing countries.
___
“We need to create hope and justice, even if just a drop of it, and this is an example that shows we can go to the justice system and work with it.” — Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu, commenting about the sentencing of an ex-police official in the killings of her father and 36 others when Guatemala’s Spanish Embassy was burned down during the country’s civil war.
___
“I have no more campaigns to run… I know, because I won both of them.” — President Barack Obama, in an apparently unscripted quip near the end of his State of the Union speech.
___
“President Obama will soon have a decision to make: Will he sign the bill or block good American jobs?” — Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, speaking about a bill that would allow construction of the Keystone oil pipeline, during the Republican rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union address.
___
“I saw ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ and thought, ‘What part of New York is this?’ It’s not about being diverse. It’s about being true to the world.” — Kenya Barris, creator of ABC’s “black-ish,” on the lack of diversity in television shows he watched growing up.
___
“Jeff’s accomplishments off the track are impressive, but his numbers on the track are unbelievable. I call him the ‘GOAT’ – the Greatest of All Time. I believe he is the greatest NASCAR driver there has ever been. What he has done outside the sport has grown the sport’s popularity immensely. I give Jeff a tremendous amount of credit for the youth movement in NASCAR. A lot of people think NASCAR started in 1992 because that’s when he came on the scene and brought in a new, young audience because he appealed to the 18- to 35-year-old demographic. We didn’t really have a driver at the time who could do that.” — Hall of Fame driver and current FOX analyst Darrel Waltrip.
