* “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”–Benjamin Franklin.
* “Keep America safe from our enemies. But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.” While that sounds like a Joe McCarthy quote, it’s actually—and alarmingly–from recently confirmed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
* “If Republicans go along with (impeachment conviction), it will destroy the party. A third of the Republicans will leave the party.”–Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul.
* “(Trump’s) Republican partners are already whispering they were privately against him all along. His anathematization by social media, corporate America, and other mainstream institutions is a preview of the place he will occupy in the popular imagination. He will join the likes of Andrew Johnson, Joe McCarthy and George Wallace as an enemy of the civic creed. A century from now, Obama’s name—not Trump’s—will adorn schools, roads and plazas.”–Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine.
* “If reckoning is postponed, American conservatism will continue to regress. … The right must disavow its extremists or be destroyed by them. … The best thing conservatives can do to hold off the far left is to deal with the rising far right.”–Garry Kasparov, chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
* “They did some great work while they was in there and they did some great (pardons) work on the way out. Let them know that I love what they did.”–Rapper Snoop Dog, who was particularly grateful that Trump commuted the sentence of his friend Michael “Harry O” Harris, the co-founder of Death Row Records.
* “Our primary divisions are not political. … Our divisions are tribal.”–Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald.
* “The off-the-shelf Republican campaign plan is bug-eyed fear-mongering on an industrial scale about race, socialism and lawlessness.”–Veteran Republican strategist Mac Stipanovich, who is now registered NPA.
* “It’s not a question of if the filibuster will be gone, but when it’ll be gone. You cannot have a democratic body where it takes 60 percent of the vote to get anything done.”—Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
* “The strategy of lying about voter fraud, delegitimizing the election outcomes and trying to suppress votes has been unmasked for the illegitimate attack on our democracy that it is, and I think that it opens a lot more doors to real conversations about how to fix our voting system and root out this cancer.”–Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
* “Be ashamed to die until you’ve won some victory for humanity.”–Horace Mann.
* “Being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”–Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman, who did her best to make America proud.
* “It would be a devastating civil rights failure if we didn’t achieve statehood now.”–Stasha Rhodes, campaign director of ‘51 for 51,’ which advocates D.C. statehood. Currently 700,000 D.C. residents have no vote in the House or Senate.
* “In his first day in office, President Biden did more to act on climate and protect American communities than Donald Trump did in four years. By following science, listening to experts and understanding the crisis we face as a country, President Biden is poised to lead us to a clean energy future, one where American families can count on clean air and water, resilient neighborhoods and good-[paying jobs and new careers.”–Florida Congresswoman Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, the chairwoman of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
* “Nature reminds us that the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is so humanly fabricated. There is only ‘we.’”–Randall H. Russell, president and CEO of the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg.
* “It’s possible to engage and critique at the same time.”—Angela Davis, activist and pioneer in radical black feminism.
* “(Ron DeSantis) seems more interested in locking horns with social media companies over what he describes as ‘big tech censorship’ than addressing an unprecedented pandemic and what it has done to our state’s workforce, rampant housing insecurity and vaccine distribution. … (Florida) has become a dystopian scramble for vaccine doses.”–State Rep. Janet Cruz, D-Tampa.
* “One of the challenges we have is that there is simply not enough space to have people cycling in and out, so this renovation is an opportunity for education in the galleries.”–Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art, on the announcement of TMA’s plans for renovations that will expand the education programs and gallery space—beginning in May.
* “The time comes periodically when the landlord needs to kick in and make some improvements.”–City Council member John Dingfelder, in reference to the city-owned Straz Center requesting $25 million for upgrades–over a five-year period–from the City Community Redevelopment Agency.
* “At the end of the day, we’re all sports fans.”–Steven Stamkos.