“The day the government has to show up in court and justify holding these guys for six years – the day before that is the day they are likely to get released.”

– Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney for the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights, predicting that the Bush administration will begin dismissing cases against detainees at Guantanamo Bay, now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the detainees are entitled to appeal to civilian courts.

“A lot of this is OK in private but looks awful put into the public.”

– Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who was about to preside over a high-profile obscenity trial when it was revealed that his personal Web site contained sexually explicit material.

“It looked like God took his hand and swatted the Earth.”

– Omaha police Lt. Jeff Theulen, a helicopter pilot who had flown over an Iowa Boy Scout campground that was struck by a deadly tornado.

“Spike Lee is very talented, but I sometimes wish he’d practice what he preaches. His points about African-Americans are well taken, but, ironically, he does the same thing to Italians in his films.”

– Italic Institute of America President Bill Dal Cerro, reacting to a running spat between motion picture directors Lee and Clint Eastwood over the absence of black characters in Eastwood’s war films.

“The mountain remains a wonderful, magnificent and ultimately dangerous place.”

– Mount Rainier National Park spokesman Kevin Bacher, after a June blizzard turned what was supposed to have been a day hike for three experienced climbers into an ordeal that killed one of them.

“Being born in captivity is a life sentence and is tantamount to locking a child in a room for their entire life.”

– Lifeforce founder Peter Hamilton, whose organization opposes the captivity of whales, commenting on the birth of a beluga whale at the Vancouver Aquarium in British Columbia.

“Idaho doesn’t have Democrats and Republicans; Idaho has voters.”

– Attorney Harry Kresky, speaking on behalf of the American Independent Movement of Idaho and the Committee for a Unified Republican Party, about why those groups want to intervene in a lawsuit over restricting Idaho’s primary election to self-declared Republican voters.

“The memory of residential schools cuts like merciless knives at our souls.”

– Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, during a ceremony at the Canada House of Commons in Ottawa, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized for the sexual and other abuse suffered by thousands of Inuit, Indian and Metis children housed in boarding schools, up until 1996, to strip them of their ethnic heritage.