“I’m not sure everyone’s going to get an ‘A’ on the first report.”

– White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, saying the July 15 progress report on President Bush’s “surge” plan in Iraq would be too soon to judge how well the Iraqi government was doing at meeting the benchmarks that are tied to the added funding approved in the spring by Congress.

“When you’re laying in the grass on a summer day, and you see the clouds, you wish you could jump on them. This is as close as you can come to jumping on them.”

– Bend, Ore., gas station owner Kent Couch, who used 105 helium-filled balloons to lift him and his lawn chair for a 193-mile trip nearly to his destination in Idaho.

“I’m not out to ruin a marriage, I’m out to save a man. I want his wife to know he’s a good man, I want his children to know he’s a good father. If he had sex out of wedlock, so what? At least he stayed with his children.”

– Canal Street Madam Jeanette Maier, after outing U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., as a regular at her New Orleans brothel, which was shut down in 2001.

“The fashion must-haves of the world are not apparel but the iPhones of the world. They are wearing technology as fashion.”

– Retail consultant Craig R. Johnson, explaining the anxiety businesses feel over the sluggish pace of clothing purchases while merchants and manufacturers prepare for this summer’s back-to-school promotions.

“The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds.”

– Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, saying that the Bush administration, of which he was a member, muzzled his attempts to speak candidly about controversial issues such as stem cell research and sex education.

“I don’t like to see him go to jail. But he’s got to be stopped.”

– Eighty-year-old Betty Halligan, after her son, Michael J. Halligan, was sentenced to prison, along with his partner, Daphne L. Wood, for stealing a home and thousands of dollars from his mother.

“What we’ve got here is an empty chair. I mean, that is as contemptuous as anybody can be of the government, of the process, of the country.”

– Congressman Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., after a House Judiciary subcommittee voted along party lines to reject the executive privilege claim cited by former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers in refusing to appear before the committee.