‘If this governor would have been in East Moline, Ill., at one of my local taverns, I would have kicked his tail end.’
— Illinois Sen. Mike Jacobs of East Moline, angry after a meeting with Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Jacobs accused the governor of threatening to run a Democratic primary candidate against him and pulling the plug on state funding for projects in Jacobs’ district if the senator did not vote for Blagojevich’s health-care expansion plan
‘I don’t expect for people to ever forgive me.’
–Andrew Speaker, the Atlanta lawyer quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis, in a public apology to airline passagers and crew members who unknowlingly flew with him and now are awaiting the results of their TB tests
‘Good-bye America … you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.’
— Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, announcing her resignation from the peace movement in her online diary
‘It’s gut-check time.’
— Jim Reilly, chairman of the Regional Transportation Authority, who asked the Illinois legislature to solve a $200 million shortfall at the region’s three transit agencies
‘There are so many properties out there, you could kill a whole forest printing out the sheets of homes for sales.’
— Mike Larson, an analyst at Weiss Research in Jupiter, Fla., on the lag in home sales
‘I’ve been doing it for 50 years. That’s enough.’
— Actor Paul Newman, on giving up acting
‘I’m like a woman scorned. I’m prepared to continue to kick their fanny until the last day I’m alive on this Earth because they have mistreated too many people.’
— Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who has become the insurance industry’s No. 1 critic since he lost a home in 2005 to Hurricane Katrina
‘Everest is a really hard mountain.’
–Katsusuke Yanagisawa, 71, who became the oldest person to climb Mt. Everest
‘Today, he still didn’t put the butter up after he made his breakfast. I was like, “You’re just asking for it, you know I’m giving a speech. Why don’t you just put the butter up?”‘
–Michelle Obama on the household habits of her husband, Sen. Barack Obama
‘If he were more likeable, he would also be a lot more marketable.’
— Wally Hayward, head of event-marketer Relay Worldwide, on baseball player Barry Bonds (below)
‘No, no for the devil. No, no for America. No, no for the occupation. No, no for Israel.’
— Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in a fiery anti-American sermon in the holy Shiite city of Kufa.
‘This is about as touching as life gets.’
— Rabbi Allen Secher, on the joint bat mitzvah of Diane Bell, 73, of Cleveland, and her granddaughter Hannah Geldermann, 13, of Lake Forest
‘I made a pact with a number of people. I said, “Please don’t leave the party without calling me first.” For a while, there weren’t too many calls. And then suddenly, there was a flurry of them. I found myself watching them slip away one by one.’
— Susan Eisenhower, President Dwight Eisenhower’s granddaughter, who said free spending by the Bush administration and a takeover of the GOP by single-issue voters are costing the party supporters
