Quotable & Notable

“The worst thing we could do is increase taxes on the economy.’’

-- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas explaining why lawmakers must make $70 billion in temporary tax cuts permanent despite pressure to eliminate or delay them to meet hurricane relief costs. He said that allowing the tax cuts to expire would be the equivalent of a tax hike.

“Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq, what George Tenet is to slam-dunk intelligence, what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad, what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy …”

-- Sen. John Kerry. “Brownie” is Michael D. Brown, who quit under fire as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s director.

“Lacerating the family in search of votes”

-- Headline above an article in the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which lambastes Italian opposition leader Roman Prodi for pledging to support civil unions for both gay and heterosexual couples.

God “doesn’t have or need to throw temper tantrums like a spoiled and undisciplined child in order to get his way.”

-- Bishop Carlton D. Pearson of Higher Dimensions Ministries in Tulsa, Okla., commenting on his belief that Hurricane Katrina was not an act of God

“Think of it as Apollo on steroids.”

-- NASA chief Michael Griffin describing the $104 billion program to launch and sustain human exploration of the moon by 2018

National Catholic Reporter, September 30, 2005