As they see it.

"This is not a conservative-versus-liberal issue, this is a reality issue."

--Utah Senator Dan Liljenquist, on the state of state pensions, in The Economist.

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"I don't think anyone could tell you they know exactly the recipe of economic policies that make sense for this period. We're going into a reinvention."

--Timothy P. McNulty, a former economic adviser to Tom Ridge, Pennsylvania's governor from 1995 to 2001, in The New York Times.

"People now tend to see any project as a waste of money, and that's just wrong. I call it the Bridge to Nowhere syndrome."

--Andrew Goetz, a University of Denver professor and an expert on transportation policy, about infrastructure projects, to the Associated Press.

"Ever since people have had chemistry kits, they have made drugs. As soon as a law is passed on this particular designer drug, there'll be something else to replace it."

--Eric See, chairman of the Department of Justice Studies and Applied Forensic Science at Methodist University, about the drug "K2," in the Fayetteville Observer.

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"We have this national psyche that we're not good at languages, it's stiff...