Quotes of the day

Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.--Edith Grossman

Sorry, ladies. You have to stop blaming the guys. It's not their fault that they didn't notice the "signals" you were giving. You know why? Because even other women have a hard time telling when a woman is interested.--Eric Barker

But in a sense, even the death of a dear soul like John Salo couldn’t teach me a lesson I had to learn for myself. First, I had to face my own death to break away into the light and into the day. Somehow, I didn’t fade away and am now wide awake to my own addictions and to the power of God’s grace in my life. I write this winter to remember John twenty five years later, to appreciate U2’s song twenty-five years later, and to pray that others might wake up from the isolation and desolation of addiction before it’s too late.--Andrew William Smith

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available. These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.--Dennis Cauchon

Thus, if these numbers are to be believed, federal workers on average earn in wages and compensation 50% more than workers in the private sector doing the same job. Bear in mind that the federal workers are paid by the private sector workers.--Alex Tabarrok

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.—George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara