Higher Quotations | Page 7

We have no higher stewardship, no higher calling than to come onto this floor and into this chamber and make the tough decisions.

We have no higher responsibility to our fellow Americans than protecting the homeland. Our lives, our freedoms, our liberties are at stake.

What we're seeing this morning is in response to OPEC's comments and also some old-fashioned year-end book squaring. Oil prices rose sharply and then fell. The market is doing some to-and-fro action, where traders saw the fluctuations and thought about pulling back instead of buying at the higher prices.

What we're seeing right now is a dangerous combination of higher costs, lower confidence and a still shaky employment outlook.

Whenever rates go up a little bit, some people aren't going to qualify. But buyers are better off because of the balanced market. That helps them more than slightly higher rates hurt them.

When we exclude the effects of the recent hurricanes, we have to come away with the conclusion that despite higher energy prices and a battery of hurricanes, the job market is not doing all that bad.

When we engraved the 442 names on the back of the medals - that's when the reality sinks in. Everybody in the whole plant had to be involved to check the names and match the medals with the cases. You see names of fathers and sons and brothers and the reality sinks in that basically whole families were wiped out trying to help people. But that's what we do - what we manufacture generally has a higher degree of meaning to those that receive it. It's not just any award.

We're seeing evidence of Utah households responding to higher fuel costs by driving less, heating less, and being more efficient. And if oil prices stay high, we should also see more enduring efforts to explore alternatives, like tar sands and oil shale.

We're seeing better earnings news in corporate America. That's what the market is celebrating, ... We made major collateral damage to stocks in the last six weeks and over a larger 2-1/2-year period. What's happening now is that the market is bottoming out and is building a higher support base in the process.

We're seeing an across the board movement today but the index may have to come down a bit before testing higher levels,