Quotable & Notable

“I want to thank the Sisters of Charity for teaching me to read and write.”

-- John Patrick Shanley accepting the best drama Tony for his play “Doubt,” which deals with clergy sex abuse. He also thanked “the Irish Christian Brothers for throwing me out of high school.”

“In 2003 Rumsfeld apparently trusted our credibility on violations by Iraq, but now that we are criticizing the United States he has lost his faith.”

-- Amnesty International Executive Director William Schulz, responding to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion that the organization had lost “any claim to objectivity or seriousness” when it issued a report calling the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay “the gulag of our time.”

“We can have a culture war in this country or a war on poverty. We can’t have both.”

-- New York Times columnist David Brooks

“The White House is searching for weapons of mass deletion.”

-- Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson reacting to Vice President Dick Cheney who said of the violence in Iraq, “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” Jackson cited similar comments from President Bush and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers

National Catholic Reporter, June 17, 2005