Say What?!

"I would rather stick needles in my eyes than spend one second of my time on that story."
CBS correspondent Lara Logan on being asked to do a story on female soldiers in Iraq and their "cyber" pets

"Running around like a mad man with a razor blade in one's hand is not the best way to solve such problems."
Russian President Vladimir Putin in response to latest U.S. sanctions against Iran

"There is an almost menacing call that you get whenever someone hears something they don't like – their people call up and threaten, or challenge, and get very nasty. That's now become the norm."
Chris Matthews of Hardball on White House officials reacting to critical reporting of the Iraq war

"If it's a clinical strike like the one that Israel carried out on the Syrian installations and no one admitted to doing it, you'd have a fierce reaction from Iran, but it would probably die down. If it were a botched job with lots of targets and civilians dying and Iranians retaliating, it could escalate and the price of oil could shoot up to God knows where. Everyone wants it not to happen, but it's like a crash happening slowly. You can see the two cars coming toward each other. There's an inevitability about it."
Leo Drollas, chief economist of the Center for Global Energy Studies, discussing the potential impact of a U.S. strike on Iran

“In corporate America, where a broader sense of social responsibility once held sway, a culture of greed has taken over. Instead of treating their employees fairly, being accountable to their shareholders and contributing to America’s prosperity, CEOs act like their corporations exist just to build their own massive fortunes.”
John Edwards

"An inside job? How dare you. How dare you. It was not an inside job. You guys have got to be careful, you're going to give Minnesota a bad reputation."
Bill Clinton to 9/11 Conspiracy hecklers at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser

"We will not be a safer country, we will not be a safer America if the whole world watches us being defeated by a bunch of kids with improvised explosive devices."
Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson

"A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend one million dollars on the Woodstock concert museum. Now my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.”
Republican presidential candidate John McCain

"It depends on how it's done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it."
Rudy Giuliani on whether waterboarding is torture

"It makes a significant difference when you have somebody in the statehouse willing to take the lead."
President Bush on difference between government response to California wildfires versus Hurricane Katrina

"This is an issue where I'm sure lots of people would love to ridicule me when I say this, but it is true that many people die from cold-related deaths every winter. And there are studies that say that climate change in certain areas of the world would help those individuals. There are also concerns that it would increase tropical diseases... again, I'm not an expert in that."
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino

"Pop music's all been trivialized in a Britney Spears-y kind of way, hasn't it? They've taken it and killed off the energy and co-opted us into this commercialism that's really, really dull. Britney is Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart's all right for T-shirts and socks, that's about what she is. The industry for a long time now, going back for 20 years solidly, has not backed songwriting from the youth point of view. It's actually killed youth culture and rebellion and repackaged and remodeled it into very, very dreary things. There's powerful stuff in rap music, but honestly, 98 percent of it is mindless and repetitive and tedious. Now, I worked with Afrika Bambaataa some 20-plus years ago, and what's changed since then? What's as good as 'The Message'? Nothing comes to mind. Most of it is utterly selfish and it's all about acquiring goods and bragging about how much jewelry you can wear at once. If that's what the white man has taught the black man, that selfishness is the root to all success, they're wrong."
John Lydon
Lydon on Rudy Giuliani:
"Now that's a very bad piece of work. Very dangerous. Scary to high hell. You've got to stop them. You've got to. You look at Mitt Romney and you know that's corrupt from head to toe, that is everything wrong in a man, the vanity onwards. Who do I like? Who's the crazy one [laughs]? There are a couple of Democrats there that just speak it. [Dennis Kucinich] is hilarious, but he ain't no sex god. It's packaging, but I want to hear values, I want to hear true principles and I don't want to hear nonsense like, 'When I get in, we'll be pulling out [of Iraq] straightaway.' That's guaranteeing a bullet in the back of the head real quick. Don't do that. Sort it out or admit that was a failure, but don't ignore it, 'cause we've all got to carry on living in this world and this problem is only going to escalate. I want answers now. I want some serious thought in it."