* “The (transition) process has not failed our country in more than 200 years, and it is not going to fail our country this year.”–Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
* “(Trump’s) strategy will fail, has no chance of affecting the outcome, does damage to the country and won’t, in the end, satisfy or change him.”–Republican election-law attorney Matthew Sanderson.
* “Donald Trump lost what, by any evidence we have so far, was a free and fair election. It’s critical for other Republican leaders to stand up and explain what actually happened.”–Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton.
* “By helping him to stoke the base’s paranoia, (Republicans) are making it less, not more likely that he climbs down off the crazy tree.”–Mona Charen, The Bulwark.
* “I think it’s going to take a lot of work over a number of years to recover that trust and that standing.”–Michele Flournoy, former undersecretary of defense for policy (2009-12) and a top Biden candidate for Secretary of Defense, on the challenge of regaining closer cooperation with our international partners.
* “It’s the real-time threat assessment information, intelligence briefing that we would like to see (President-elect Biden) have access to.”–Senior Biden transition adviser Jen Psaki.
* “Why, when somebody has won millions more votes than their opponent, are we still deliberating over 10,000 votes here, 5,000 votes there?”–Carol Anderson, professor of African-American studies at Emory University.
* “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”–Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee.
* “The first time in American history that the election of the vice president would be more historic than the election of the president.”–Joel Goldstein, St. Louis University law professor emeritus.
* “Trump underperformed his party. … How could Republicans do so well when Trump didn’t? Because the election was about him. Democrats turned out in massive numbers not to vote for Joe Biden but to vote against Donald Trump. Trump, not Biden and not Kamala Harris, energized the Democratic base.”–Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch.
* “Our swing voter is not red-to-blue. Our swing voter is … the non-voter to voter.”–New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
* “The American people have voted for divided government and a less divisive tone in national politics.”–William A. Galston, Wall Street Journal.
* “A Trump pushed outside the legal moat that surrounds the White House becomes, for the most part, a Trump who can be sued and penalized just as any other American can. That could also give fresh traction to the sexual assault cases against him.”–Tim O’Brien, Bloomberg News.
* “Its insistence on denying reality has reduced the GOP to a state beyond parody.”–Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald.
* “A scalpel rather than a bulldozer.”–SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts, on what the court should use when reviewing laws.
* “The success of the Pfizer vaccine means that the plague year of 2020 will be remembered as the time when traditional vaccines began to be supplanted by genetic vaccines. … These new vaccines deliver a piece of genetic coding that will instruct human cells to produce, on their own, components of a targeted virus. These safe components can then stimulate the patient’s immune system.”–Walter Isaacson, Tulane history professor and former chairman of CNN.
* “I wish President Trump would publicly concede and honor America’s tradition of peaceful transfers of power. … It’s time for Florida Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott to publicly accept Joe Biden as our president-elect.”–Mike Fasano, the Republican tax collector in Pasco County and a former state legislator.
* “I think Gov. DeSantis sees himself as a presidential hopeful. And anything he does that could be interpreted as cooperating with Biden would hurt him.”–State Sen. Janet Cruz, D-Tampa.
* “The Boston Tea Party members would have been lawfully shot under Florida’s law by the British East India Tea Company.”–Former Miami-Dade prosecutor Aubrey Webb, in reference to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposed expansion of the state’s stand your ground law.
* “We’re shifting from decades of developers ruling the roost.”–Re-elected Democratic County Commissioner Pat Kemp.
* “It’s ironic, but a Category 5 hurricane is way easier to forecast than a tropical storm. It’s just the way it is–the upper-level support just isn’t there and the models have a hard time grabbing tropical storms.”–Ruskin-based National Weather Service meteorologist Stephen Shively.