“When you have suicide attempts or so-called self-harm incidents, it shows the type of impact indefinite detention can have.”

-- Amnesty International spokesman Alistair Hodgett, reacting to the recent announcement by the U.S. military that 23 prisoners at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, tried to kill or harm themselves over nine days in August 2003

“Come on, in real life you’d never get away with something like that.”

-- Eric Maierson, from a list called “Things I’d Probably Say If the Bush Administration Were Just a Weekly TV Show and I Were a Regular Viewer,” posted on the Web site of McSweeney’s, a quarterly literary journal

Cardinals silence Jesuits

-- That’s the Cardinals of Greenwich, Conn., High School. The Greenwich High swim team defeated Fairfield College Prep Jan. 20. The headline comes from the Greenwich Time. The Jesuits have bested the Cardinals only once in 38 years.

“My map looks like a Christmas tree with all the stars on it.”

-- Lt. Col. Geoffrey Slack of the 69th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, describes a map in the unit’s headquarters that uses red stars to mark where remotely detonated bombs have exploded on their patrols.

“My goal in life is to be as good a person as my dog already thinks I am.”

-- Anonymous

National Catholic Reporter, February 4, 2005