Linda Ellerbee

"'These boat people,' says the government of Hong Kong, 'they all want to go to America.' Well, I swear I don't know why, do you? I mean take Vietnam. Why would any Vietnamese come to America after what America did for Vietnam? Don't they remember My Lai, napalm, Sylvester Stallone? Clearly they have no more sense over there, than say, Mexicans who keep trying to get into this country even though this country stole large parts of their country from them in the first place."

Linda Ellerbee

"Well, am I a liberal, a conservative, or what? What...I believe in sunny summer mornings when the grass is sweet and the wind is green with possibilities. I believe in chili with no beans and iced tea all year round....I believe music is too important to be left to musicians, and that Ella Fitzgerald is the best American singer ever, and that Beethoven would have liked Chuck Berry....And so it goes."

Steve Hurst

"The [Afghan] army has controlled this beautifully rugged landscape with the help of women right from the revolution. It's the women of this country who have the most to lose if this Marxist revolution fails, if the government falls to the fundamentalist Muslim rebels. A woman's place in such a society would be back under the head to toe covering of the chaterra, cooking and bearing children."

Charles Kuralt

"Some analysts said that the country's now close to full employment, the point at which the available labor pool dries up. That's not the same as saying that everyone who wants a job has a job. But business correspondent Ray Brady reports the high employment rate is causing problems."

Dan Rather

"Good evening. A double dose of worrisome economic statistics tonight from the government: inflation, with its highest quarterly gain in two years; home building, sharply down. That left some economists alarmed."

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Tom Brokaw

"This country's economic expansion has now entered its seventh year and the Joint Economic Committee of Congress says still more growth can be expected. It warned, however, that this growth could be threatened by huge budget deficits and renewed inflation. But, the inflation news today is reassuring."

Washington Post

"GNP Figures Indicate a Slowdown"

New York Times

"Number of Nation's Poor Remains at 32 Million for a Second Year"

Washington Times

"Number of poor fell, Census Bureau says"

New York Daily News

"New method to count poor: Census report makes 'em disappear"

Bob Faw

"As rockets made in the U.S.A. keep falling here and flares to deflect those rockets keep burning small children, resentment towards the United States grows...For the Russians, Afghanistan may no longer be what Gorbachev called, 'a bleeding wound.' But for many here what is bleeding now is America's image."

Ronnie Lovler

"The latest incident of alleged Contra violence in south central Nicaragua killed whatever chances there might have been for the 19-month-old ceasefire agreement to be extended....The Sandinistas argue that they've given the Contras ample opportunity to meet their obligations under terms of the regional peace plan. Now they say the time has come for the rebels and the Bush Administration to do their part if there is to be peace in Nicaragua."

Ted Koppel

"A testament to courage: the courage of some unabashed trade unionists and civil rights workers, Leftists and yes, American Communists, who fought for principles that we now take for granted."

Stephen Cohen

"What does realistic mean with Mr. Gorbachev any more? We used to know what realism was in world affairs, but we have a Soviet leader as bold as we, I think, have ever seen, and a man who seems to be some kind of dreamer. He dreams new dreams. I think he's saying 'Match me in boldness and we'll create a new world.'"

Barry Petersen

"For Gorbachev at the end of four years, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. There was triumph at the Moscow summit, when cold warrior Ronald Reagan said the Evil Empire belonged to a time now past. Bittersweet triumph when the Soviet troops came home from Afghanistan. The Soviets did not win, but Gorbachev did. He had the courage to end Soviet involvement."

Richard Threlkeld

"These days Cuba doesn't count for nearly as much in the Soviet military scheme of things....Much of the equipment...is old and obsolete. Although with its militia the Cuban armed forces are the largest in Latin America, this Soviet weaponry is years behind the times."

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Barry Petersen

"The Soviets have spent billions of dollars keeping Fidel Castro supplied....The equipment, the best the Soviet Union can supply....Fidel Castro still believes in the Mao adage that power comes from the barrel of a gun. And his island bristles with some of the most modern, such as these advanced MiG 23s."

Washington Post

"Managua Forms Election Panel Containing Opposition Members"

New York Times

"U.S. PSYCHIATRISTS FAULT SOVIET UNITS: Team Finds Inmates Are Still Held for Political Reasons"

Andy Rooney

"Communism got to be a terrible word here in the United States, but our attitude toward it may have been unfair. Communism got in with a bad crowd when it was young and never had a fair chance...
The Communist ideas of creating a society in which everyone does his best for the good of everyone is appealing and fundamentally a more uplifting idea than capitalism. Communism's only real weakness seems to be that it doesn't work."

Ronnie Lovler

"The latest incident of alleged Contra violence in south central Nicaragua killed whatever chances there might have been for the 19-month-old ceasefire agreement to be extended....The Sandinistas argue that they've given the Contras ample opportunity to meet their obligations under terms of the regional peace plan. Now they say the time has come for the rebels and the Bush Administration to do their part if there is to be peace in Nicaragua."

Peter Jennings

"Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free. Some of Cuba's health care is world class. In heart disease, for example, in brain surgery. Health and education are the revolution's great success stories."

Tom Oliphant

"I've known Barney Frank since was in college. He's a man of surpassing integrity that I've never known to be questioned. I think he's a master politician, which people forget. He's also a magnificent Congressman, and above all, there is nothing in this episode that counters any of those other images, and I would expect him to survive this smear in good standing."

Bryant Gumbel

"You two fill the voids left by those who were casualties of an ethics war Republicans started."

Jamie Gangel

"Polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans support a woman's right to a legal abortion."

Boston Globe

"Most in US favor ban on majority of abotions, poll finds"

Los Angeles Times

"Wright Violated Rules 69 Times, Ethics Panel Says"

Washington Post

"For Now, Constituents Supporting Rep. Frank"

Mike Wallace

"I read Mother Jones carefully and look forward to every issue. After all, stories that started out in Mother Jones have wound up on 60 Minutes."

Kathleen Sullivan

"In just seven weeks, the '80s will be behind us. It was a decade dominated, in politics and in style, by the Reagans....While the wealthy got most of the attention, those who needed it most were often ignored. More homeless, less spending on housing. The gap between the top and the bottom grew in the '80s....The AIDS crisis began in the '80s. Some say the decade's compassion gap made it worse."

Abigail Trafford

"The Reagan Legacy: A Swelling Medical Underclass in a Land of Plenty"

"An unfortunate legacy of the Reagan revolution is a swelling medical underclass: alcoholics and drug addicts who deluge emergency rooms and fill prisons, AIDS babies and crack newborns in overwhelmed pediatric wards, homeless children with anemia, schizophrenics and other mental patients in shelters and jails and on the streets...While Ronald Reagan did not cause the medical underclass, his laissez-faire approach to social problems exacerbated the trend."

Richard Threlkeld

"After eight years of what many saw as the Reagan Administration's benign neglect of the poor and studied indifference to civil rights, a lot of those who lived through this week in Overtown [rioting in a section of Miami] seemed to think the best thing about George Bush is that he is not Ronald Reagan....There is an Overtown in every big city in America. Pockets of misery made even meaner and more desperate the past eight years."

Margaret Carlson

"Perhaps the Democrat who best personifies this republic of virtue is former President Jimmy Carter. His reputation burnished by the elevated tone of his retirement, Carter would actually bring to the task energy, integrity and his legendary distaste for congressional business as usual. He could even boast a made-to-order campaign slogan: 'After the Wright stuff, why not the best?'"

Peter Jennings

"The person we have chosen this week [as "Person of the Week"] has continued his life with distinction, considerable grace, and with a very strong commitment to peace and justice...In the public's mind, the scales were never balanced. Carter's successes in foreign affairs, peace between Egypt and Israel, renewed respect for the United States in Latin America, have always been outweighed in the public mind by the hostage crisis."

Laurence Barrett

"Atwater's fouling the civic atmosphere with vicious misinformation is bad enough; compounding that with the White House hypocrisy is too much. If Bush really wants to prove himself a political environmentalist in search of a kinder, gentler America, he should sack Atwater."

Time

"Support Family Planning. In 1984 the Reagan Administration cut off U.S. aid to the two major international family-planning organizations...Unless the growth in the world population is slowed, it will be impossible to make serious progress on any environmental issue. The U.S. should immediately restore the aid it withdrew."

Bill Moyers

"The documentary has held up as both true and sadly prophetic. While Congress restored some of the cuts made in those first Reagan budgets, in the years since, the poor and the working poor have borne the brunt of the cost of the Reagan Revolution. The hardest-hit programs have been welfare, housing and other anti-poverty measures. Even programs that were not cut have failed to keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, rich people go big tax breaks. And the middle class kept most of their subsidies intact. As a result, the Reagan years brought on a wider gap between rich and poor."

Lesley Stahl

"We have this drug problem, we have an education problem in the country. All we keep doing is cutting the domestic budget because taxes aren't being asked for. When does it become necessary to start investing in our future by fixing these problems, and when you do decide it becomes necessary, won't it become necessary to raise taxes? And just isn't that a bald truth?"

Mark Phillips

"Returning from his foreign travels, George Bush came home to domestic economic realities today. To the stubborn budget deficit that most economists say will never be seriously reduced without the new taxes to which the President remains opposed."

John Chancellor

"Thousands may have been gunned down in Beijing, but what about the millions of American kids whose lives are being ruined by an enormous failure of the country's educational system...We can and we should agonize about the dead students in Beijing, but we've got a much bigger problem here at home."

Eric Engberg

"Will the military leaders there b embarrassed by this, will this be something like Kent State was for our military?"

Lewis Lapham

"For the most part, the Nicaraguan Contras burned villages and murdered civilians. On behalf of their cause, Reagan sold out his oath of office and subverted the Constitution....

"Oliver North presented himself as the immortal boy in the heroic green uniform of Peter Pan. Although wishing to be seen as a humble patriot, the colonel's testimony showed him to be a treacherous and lying agent of the national security state, willing to do anything asked of him by a President to whom he granted the powers of an Oriental despot."