May 2008 Quotes

If your joy is derived from what society thinks of you, you're always going to be disappointed. ~ Madonna

The idea to use backpacks came from my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything. ~ Ai Weiwei

On August 5, 2012, a few days before the fourth anniversary of the war, a forty-seven-minute Russian documentary film "8 Avgusta 2008. Poteryannyy den" (8 August 2008. The Lost Day) was posted on YouTube. In the film retired and active service generals accused former President Medvedev of indecisiveness and even cowardice during the conflict. They praised Putin, on the other hand, for his bold and vigorous action. According to one of Medvedev's critics, retired Army General Yury Baluevsky, a former First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, "a decision to invade Georgia was made by Putin before Medvedev was inaugurated President and Commander-in-Chief in May 2008. A detailed plan of military action was arranged and unit commanders were given specific orders in advance." [...]

After the release of the documentary film Putin confirmed that the Army General Staff had, indeed, prepared a plan of military action against Georgia. It was prepared "at the end of 2006, and I authorized it in 2007," he said. Interestingly, Putin also said "that the decision to 'use the armed forces' had been considered for three days - from around 5 August," which clearly contradicts the official Russian version that the Russian army only reacted to a Georgian attack that started on August 7. According to this plan not only heavy weaponry and troops were prepared for the invasion, but also South Ossetian paramilitary units were trained to support the Russian invading troop ~ Marcel H. Van Herpen

I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.
(Washington DC, 12 May, 2008) ~ George W. Bush

Texas created more jobs in 2008 than the rest of the states - combined. ~ Rick Perry

Back in 2008, unable to come to terms with its many creditors, Vallejo had declared bankruptcy. Eighty percent of the city's budget - and the lion's share of the claims that had thrown it into bankruptcy - were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public safety workers. Relations between the police and the firefighters, on the one hand, and the citizens, on the other, were at historic lows. The public safety workers thought that the city was out to screw them on their contracts; the citizenry thought that the public safety workers were using fear as a tool to extort money from them. The local joke was that "P.D." stands for "Pay or Die." The city council meetings had become exercises in outrage: at one, a citizen arrived and tossed a severed pig's head onto the floor. ~ Michael Lewis

I got involved in lots of different areas round about 2007, 2008. Just working with lots of different people and stretching myself in different ways. I was working on art projects and working with other writers, just doing bits and pieces, trying to keep busy. ~ Stevie Jackson

The sport in 2000 wasn't as big as it is now [in 2008]. ~ Robbie Lawler

I highly recommend the approach Marshall Rosenberg details in Nonviolent Communication (2nd Edition 2008), which has essentially three parts: When X happens [described factually, not judgmentally], I feel Y [especially the deeper, softer emotions], because I need Z [fundamental needs and wants]. ~ Rick Hanson

World opinion" - that vapid, amoral concept - deems the murder of members of one's group less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Congo elicits virtually no attention from "world opinion." Between 1998 and 2008, according to the International Rescue Committee, 5.4 million people in Congo were killed, and virtually no one in the world knows this. But if a few Iraqi prisoners are sexually humiliated in an American-run prison, or if one Palestinian dies at the hands of an Israeli soldier, the story is on the front pages of the world's newspapers. ~ Dennis Prager

My parents were forever making lemonade. Neither responded to problems by drinking too much, taking anti-depressants, overeating, or suggesting they were victims. In fact, I can't recall a single day my parents slept in - the way many of us might when life throws a wrench in our plans. My parents were (are in the case of my mother - my father died in 2008) unfailingly resilient people, capable of waking up each day with a positive attitude, a new resolve to make things better. Part of this was due to their personalities, but it was also because of the generation in which they were raised. ~ Suzanne Venker

This is a president [Barack Obama] who came into office in 2008 with a big majority in the House and with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Because of his policies and his conduct in office, seven years later, we have our largest majority in the House since 1928, and we have a majority in the Senate and we have 31 of the 60 governorships. ~ Chris Christie

Thus, an index built for vector space retrieval cannot, in general, be used for phrase queries. Moreover, there is no way of demanding a vector space score for a phrase query - we only know the relative weights of each term in a document. ~ Prabhakar Raghavan

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly. ~ Tariq Ali

Ever since Obama's election team and media thugs made me famous for asking a simple question in 2008, I've had more than my share of death threats by people who are by definition at least a little crazy. ~ Joe Wurzelbacher

Regulators in Britain, America and Switzerland fined six banks - HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup - a total of $4.3 billion for manipulating foreign exchange markets. Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said that traders at the banks had colluded to rig important benchmark exchange rates between 2008 and 2013. ~ Anonymous

I took a lot of heat from Republicans when I stepped out of John McCain's campaign after the 2008 primaries. I still supported McCain, and voted for him, but I just didn't want to be the tip of the spear attacking Obama. ~ Mark McKinnon

Main Street versus Wall Street was the 2008 economic mantra of Democrat Barack Obama. ~ Nina Easton

Hadn't been able to avoid hearing about the Tea Party, a recrudescence of the far right sooner than I would've hoped. Depending on whom you ask, the Tea Party formed either as a spontaneous grassroots protest against the government's massive interventions in the economy after the financial collapse of 2008, an hysterical backlash against our first black president, or just a hasty rebranding of the Republican Party now that the name Republican had taken on the same stigma as the Pinto, DC-10, and other products that reliably self-destruct. Their platform was the usual Republican wish list - cut taxes, gut the government, repeal the last century and revoke the social contract - and happened to coincide with the financial interests of their billionaire backers. They were widely regarded, on the left,* as dingbats. But today I was going to resist the impulse to sneer and feel superior and instead try, for once, to listen. ~ Tim Kreider

'Green' is likely to be a big issue in the 2008 U.S. presidential election - largely in response to George Bush's suicidal refusal to engage with environmental issues. ~ Zac Goldsmith

Society shall never make progress unless it changes its basic objective of making things easier;instead our main objective should be to make men stronger!I say "men" as women have always had and shall continue to have all the strength needed!!-Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad(Woods oration-2008) ~ Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad

Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama. ~ David Limbaugh

According to the National Gardening Association, food gardening is now a $3.5 billion industry. In 2013, 37 million home gardens were growing food, an increase of four million since 2008. Even First Lady Michelle Obama joined the trend, planting a "kitchen garden" on the White House (back) lawn. Gardeners' most popular motivations: better-tasting food and lower grocery bills. ~ Anonymous

As our values are the core to who we are as human beings, they are also the easiest way to identify and connect with others in meaningful ways. Think about it - most political campaigns are based around values. Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign galvanized millions of youth behind two very clear values - hope and change. ~ Adam Braun

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, our country has been experiencing an "explosive growth in extremist-group activism across the United States" in recent years. The law center reported that so-called "patriot groups" - right-wing outfits steeped in anti-government conspiracy theories - grew in number from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009 - an astonishing 244 percent increase that apparently reflected a backlash against the election of America's first African American president. ~ Arsalan Iftikhar

On 9/11, 2001, the Navy stood at 316 ships. By 2008, after one of the great military buildups in American history, we were at 278 ships and had 49,000 fewer sailors. ~ Ray Mabus

I have a power word that I use-when I qualified for the Olympics in 2008, it was fighter. That way when I'm in the race and I get to those dark moments, I can think of the word and it evokes that emotion for me. ~ Kara Goucher

I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn't, so in the end they just released it themselves. ~ Lana Del Rey

One of the first members of Congress I met when I was first elected in 2008 was Barney Frank. ~ Chellie Pingree

Obama has placed himself in perfect political position: he spent the 2008 campaign convincing the American people that he's a racial unifier rather than a divider, without any evidence to prove it. ~ Ben Shapiro

Recently released government economic statistics covering 2010, the first year of real recovery from the financial collapse of 2008, found that fully 93 percent of additional income gains coming out of the recession went straight into the wallets and purses of the top 1 percent. ~ Eric Alterman

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises. ~ Lawrence Summers

After the Republican Party did everything that Colin Powell says it needs to do to grow, and nominated the very kind of candidate he wanted in 2008, what did Powell do? He endorsed Obama! So according to the Drive-Bys and David Gergen, Republicans should let somebody who campaigned and voted for Obama, tell us how to build our party. ~ Rush Limbaugh

In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. And there was not a single Pashto speaker. ~ Rory Stewart

I wasn't really happy with the way 2008 turned out for me. I wanted to change some things. ~ Ryan Lochte

One third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Wall Street buyers of repackaged loans didn't mind buying risky paper because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal government: read bailout from the taxpayers. Today's housing mess can be laid directly at the feet of Congress and the White House. ~ Walter E. Williams

My coach, Liang Chow, had one rule while I was training for the 2008 Olympics: no skiing. I could do anything I wanted outside the gym, he said, except ski. ~ Shawn Johnson

I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey. ~ Maria Semple

Even a member of the state district attorney's office, Keva Landrum-Johnson, had sent a letter urging the federal Department of Justice to become involved. "More likely than not, the court will quash the indictments and the State will be left with no viable option other than to recharge some or all of the defendants on lesser offenses," Landrum-Johnson wrote presciently on August 8, 2008, five days before Judge Bigelow did just that. "Admittedly, my office bears much of the responsibility for the position we are in now." Landrum-Johnson, ~ Ronnie Greene

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one's final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or "It's O.K." or "I'm sorry" or "I love you."

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system's expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what's most important to them ~ Atul Gawande