"That's why we moan and bitch and bellyache."

"Because by doing so we hope in our next incarnation, life will, in all senses of the term, be cool."

"Lobsters? This is how I wind up after leading a just life? In a tank on Third Avenue?"

"The Lord works in strange ways... Take Phil Pinchuck. The man keeled over with an aneurysm, he’s now a hamster. All day, running at the stupid wheel. For years he was a Yale professor. My point is he’s gotten to like the wheel. He pedals and pedals, running nowhere, but he smiles."

"The United States has only one government and only one President at a time."

Said Barack Obama, at his press conference today, emphasizing the economy and pointing out a number of things that need to be done immediately. Presumably, President Bush is paying attention.

ADDED: There are 2 quotes that belong in the famous quote books:

1. "I've spoken to all the Presidents. Living, obviously. I don't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing."

2. "A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me."

UPDATE: Obama apologizes to Nancy Reagan:

"President-elect Barack Obama called Nancy Reagan today to apologize for the careless and off handed remark he made during today’s press conference," said transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. "The President-elect expressed his admiration and affection for Mrs. Reagan that so many Americans share and they had a warm conversation."

Obama was asked at his press conference today if he'd spoken to all the "living" presidents.

"I have spoken to all of them who are living," he responded. "I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances."

He was apparently confusing stories about Reagan's consulting with an astrologer with those about other First Ladies -- from Mary Todd Lincoln to Hillary Clinton -- who tried to make contact with figures from the past.

Yes, exactly. It was Hillary who talked with the dead! Here's the NYT report from June 25, 1996:

Although her views on altered states of consciousness and reincarnation would strike many Americans as outlandish, Jean Houston has instructed executives from such buttoned-down companies as Xerox, lectured at such sober universities as Harvard and worked with such mainstream figures as Margaret Mead.

Dr. Houston, a 57-year-old author of 15 books who is admired by many adherents of the human potential movement and of New Age mysticism, made headlines over the weekend because of her work with another mainstream figure, Hillary Rodham Clinton. "Seances" were among the interpretations of sessions in which Dr. Houston and Mrs. Clinton supposedly conversed with Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi.

But in an interview here at her Rockland County home today, Dr. Houston said Mrs. Clinton never made any seance-like effort to contact the spirits of Mrs. Roosevelt or Gandhi but simply engaged in an intellectual role-playing exercise to tackle a problem the First Lady was having with her book about children, "It Takes a Village."

"We were using an imaginative exercise to force her ideas, to think about how Eleanor would have responded to a particular problem," Dr. Houston said. "I have never been to a seance."...

Dr. Houston said that Mrs. Clinton would never engage in spiritualism because she is "a very committed Christian" and a "serious, reflective and prayerful" woman.

Judith Regan: Crazy or the "reincarnation of Linda Tripp"?

Roger Parloff rips into Judith Regan's 70-page complaint:

When I first got out of law school and was clerking for a federal judge in Texas, I did see a few comparable pleadings, though those were usually filed “pro se” — i.e., by the plaintiff himself, without the assistance of a lawyer. One, I remember, was a civil rights suit naming as defendants the President of the United States, all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, the plaintiff’s ex-wife, and a local Pizza Hut.

Like that complaint, Regan’s reads like one of those humor pieces in The New Yorker, where it not-so-gradually dawns on the reader that the narrator is out of his gourd. Even though you’re hearing only one side of the story, that’s enough to make up your mind against the griper.

Ouch.

[W]hat’s remarkable about the complaint is how far it ventures beyond merely disputing that she said anything anti-Semitic in that fateful phone call — a seemingly winnable, he-said-she-said squabble had her lawyers stopped her there.

Instead, they’ve allowed her to allege that News Corp. had actually been plotting her demise for at least five years before the Simpson debacle. “This smear campaign was necessary to advance News Corp.’s political agenda, which has long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambitions,” they write in paragraph 1 of the complaint. “Defendants knew they would be protecting Giuliani if they could preemptively discredit her,” the complaint continues.

As I understand it, Regan’s saying that News Corp. has been undermining her credibility for years because it feared she knew about unspecified skeletons in Giuliani’s closet that she had learned during her 2001 affair with then-Mayor Giuliani’s then-Police Chief Bernard Kerik and, further, that the company anticipated Regan might go public with if Giuliani ever ran for president.

Parloff finds it all manifestly crazy.

But the Regan lawsuit excites the mind of Frank Rich:

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he ... discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani’s side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city’s $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.

Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office....

Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to protect Rudy’s secrets? Her complaint does not say....

The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.

Eh. If there's something there, roll it out. Let us see it. It's a 70-page complaint. Why aren't we seeing it?

A reincarnation of Vishnu...

... but "she cannot live like this."

Religion and science can coexist.