"It doesn't matter if your boat is a 27 footer or a 54 footer. This lady treats everybody like regular people."
- my uncle, talking about a genial hostess who treated upper-middle class yacht owners with no classist difference from the upper class yacht owners. He said this while we were out on his 27 foot boat. In case he's reading this, I love him, but this was a funny thing to say.

"What a lot of people are saying is it's very possible to take Putin and his government at their word. To say that Putin has a commitment to the idea of democracy, that Russia has committed itself to a European choice, and that it doesn't really make anything that you have to be worried about or afraid of. But what people are concerned about is what happens after Putin. The ultra-nationalists have shown stronger and stronger showings in all the recent elections. If Putin were to leave office and a nationalist for example, a warmonger were to get into power, and had the amount of power that's now been accumulated institutionally, then everybody would have something to worry about."
- Kim Murphy from the Los Angeles Times on NPR's Day-To-Day, contrasting Putin with a "nationalist war-monger", apparently with no irony intended.