WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Daisy Rittgers, 105 year-old retired teacher depends on her 3% pension COLA to survive. (E. Jason Wambsgans)  

Daisy Rittgers

"Why should anybody take it away from me? Right's right, and wrong's wrong." -- Chicago Tribune, "Pension reform could hit oldest retired teachers the hardest"

Sun-Times Editorial

Crime grows like a weed from the ground up; cops and prosecutors can only lop off the ugly blooms. If we as a city are truly fed up with the killing, no longer able to look away, we must pour our energies like never before into all those ways in which an enlightened society grows a beautiful flower — better schools, more after-school programs, greater economic investment in the neighborhoods and more jobs that pay a wage a person can live on. -- Murders bind Chicago and Newtown in tragedy

 Bonita Robinson, retired Chicago teacher

Listening to person after person eloquently, yet desperately, plead for their schools not to be closed during the Austin-North Lawndale Network school utilization hearing on Jan. 31 brought forth, to my mind, heart-wrenching images of our enslaved African-American ancestors pleading for their loved ones not to be beaten, sold at auction, or killed. -- Letter to S-T editor

Jackson Potter, CTU

“Barbara [Byrd-Bennett] has said she wants to hear from the communities, and they’re listening, but here is a district that has never done this well saying they want to expand it tenfold?”  --  Sun-Times "School chief calling in the Marine to help in school closings"  

Chris Hayes

"Any time I see a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, I run headlong in the opposite direction." -- Up with Chris Hayes