Quotable & Notable

“This is a cleansing process. It’s a good thing going through it. I think it’s going to have a positive end.”

-- Rep. Tom Delay, R-Texas, on the House’s problems with lobbyists and ethics. Delay is under investigation and resigned his House leadership role.

“Losing Christ could imperil group’s finances”

-- Headline in The Cincinnati Enquirer about Christ Hospital pulling out of the Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati

“Going hungry is a very bad feeling. … You really want to chew on something. Sometimes I’ll chew on my hand or a piece of plastic just to be chewing.”

-- Eric, 13, in a special report on hunger in America by the PBS news program “Frontline”

“We’ve put the sickest and poorest of Medicare’s beneficiaries at risk during a transition that could have been made smoother.”

-- Diane Rowland of the Kaiser Family Foundation on the more than 300,000 Medicare recipients who were left without coverage or discounts when their drug coverage was switched to the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan Jan. 1

“I wasn’t using my civil liberties anyway.”

-- Seen on a bumper sticker

“Most of you are so young you don’t know who I am, and that’s good.”

-- Former Praise the Lord leader Jim Bakker, whose sex and money scandal in the late 1980s resulted in prison time, speaking to a South Carolina congregation

National Catholic Reporter, February 3, 2006