“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in a Dec. 11, 1964 speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

“We are not immune, no school district, no school is immune anymore to these kinds of random acts.”

— Mead School District Superintendent Steve Enoch after a seventh grader was arrested for bringing a loaded handgun to Mead Middle School last week.

“John Kerry did the right thing by choosing not to drag the presidential election into court. Slade Gorton made the same choice in the 2000 election. I hope Christine Gregoire will follow their example.”

— GOP gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi on Nov. 12.

“Dino Rossi’s not going to give up, and neither are we.”

— Chris Vance, chairman of the Washington state Republican Party, at rally last Tuesday in Olympia.

“We want our kids to fill these new jobs, instead of businesses needing to hire workers from out of state.”

— Outgoing Washington Gov. Gary Locke, referring in his farewell address to the need to fund greater access to the state’s public universities.

“That was a real labor of love.”

— Diane Horning, a New Jersey woman whose 26-year-old son died in the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack, reacting to the Kodak company’s restoration of some 8,000 personal photographs, retrieved from the wreckage and now being posted on the Web for survivors such as Horning.

“Even if an order is unlawful, it is an absolute defense in this case if Spec. Graner did not know that the order was unlawful.”

— Defense attorney Guy Womack in the court martial of Army Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., who was convicted last week of prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

“That means someone is playing a joke, I think.”

— State land surveyor Ken Brown, speculating as to why 5.7-acre Bevis Lake has been renamed in federal Census Bureau records as Butthead Lake.

“One word is glaringly absent and that word is ‘marriage.’ “

— Former professional football player Jeff Kemp, now head of Bellevue-based Families Northwest, criticizing proposed guidelines for sex education in the public schools of Washington.