Quotable & Notable

“It didn’t work.”

Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas Mann on the Republican plan to intimidate Democrats into renewing the Patriot Act and approving oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

“Don’t go breaking his heart”

-- Headline in London’s The Sun newspaper above a story about the marriage of Sir Elton John and his longtime partner, David Furnish. It is a reference to one of the singer’s hits from the 1970s

“I will be obliged to suppress St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish.”

-- Archbishop Raymond L. Burke of St. Louis saying that the lay board that controls the parish has chosen to lead its members into schism. Burke excommunicated the six board members and the priest they recently hired.

“We’ve talked about the possibility that the new Iraqi government will see no advantage in putting its security forces out on the street quickly” if that means the departure of American firepower.

-- A senior White House official quoted by The New York Times’ David E. Sanger

“It’s not good.”

-- Rudolf Jaenisch, a leading stem cell scientist in Cambridge, Mass., reacting to allegations that Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk’s high-profile human cloning work may have been “fabricated”

“With 160,000 troops there, the idea that we could do that is so far from reality, nor was there any intention that we should do that.”

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explaining that the Pentagon never expected to guarantee security in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein. “It is the Iraqis’ country. They’ve got 28 million people there,” he said.

National Catholic Reporter, January 6, 2006