Insight: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” —William Pitt (1708-1778)

Upright: “The Chinese are engaged in a full-court blitzkrieg of stealing American technology, trying to influence our political system, trying to steal secrets at our research universities and so forth. … China is a very serious threat to the United States geopolitically, economically, militarily, and a threat to the integrity of our institutions given their ability to influence things.” —Attorney General Bill Barr

For the record: “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you. Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country.” —Dr. Anthony Fauci

Rare Hollywood accolades, part I: “I think the president is handling it in a good way. We see him on television every day, he’s involved, and the travel ban early on was a great idea — which he did in spite of protest about that.” —actor Dennis Quaid

Rare Hollywood accolades, part II: “The struggle is real. Right now we’re struggling. People want to criticize the president, but imagine being president of a country and have your country got sick. So it’s difficult for him.” —actor Tracy Morgan

Braying jackass: “May be relevant to note that there is a long, close association between right-wing activism and medical quackery.” —New York Times’s Paul Krugman

Never let a crisis go to waste: “We have an opportunity … to do so many things now to change some of the structural things that are wrong, some of the structural things we couldn’t get anybody’s attention on. … Everybody now understands that we have a voting system that is not transparent and clear and available for everyone. Everyone understands that the environment has impacted on this coronavirus and mounting evidence of that.” —Joe Biden

Non compos mentis: “We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods? I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses.” —Pope Francis

Dezinformatsiya, part I: “If you’re wondering where the threat to freeze funding to the WHO comes from, well, you may not be surprised to learn it is a Fox News talking point. It’s also playing the blame game — scapegoating.” —CNN’s Don Lemon

Dezinformatsiya, part II: “If you tuned into it hoping you were going to hear from the country’s top scientists, you were likely disappointed. What you mostly heard was the president. And what you saw was a hijacking. A hijacking of the task force press conference by a president determined to rewrite the history of his early and reprehensibly irresponsible response to this virus.” —CNN’s Anderson Cooper

Tone deaf: “We will have many body bags in front of us if we don’t behave. When there are cracks at national level and global level, that’s when the virus succeeds. For God’s sake, we have lost more than 60,000 citizens of the world.” —WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus excoriating Trump, despite the former being largely responsible for letting the virus spread by colluding with China

And last… “This goes one of two ways. Our little experiment with living in a communist dictatorship repels most Americans and makes us hunger for freedom and independence, leading to a great reawakening. Or we grow used to being controlled and dependent, and the opposite result follows.” —Matt Walsh