“If I had gotten a degree 30 years ago, what good would it be with all the changes now?”

– Spokane Deputy Police Chief Bruce A. Roberts, who joined the department in 1974 and is the only one of the four candidates for chief who doesn’t have a college degree.

“He’s just our kid. He’s just Adam.”

– Wanda Morrison, whose basketball-star son Adam was just chosen by the Charlotte Bobcats as the third pick in the National Basketball Association draft.

“In what possible way does this encourage sexual activity? By keeping it potentially lethal? That’s a warm, charming way to express backward social priorities, now isn’t it? By that logic, we should ban tetanus shots because they encourage us to step on nails.”

– Spokane advertising executive and father David Camp, commenting on objections to a national advisory committee’s recommendation that girls as young as 9 be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus that can cause cervical cancer.

“Certainly, there’s grander things that can happen down there than a surface parking lot.”

– Dan Geiger, regional vice president of Diamond Parking, owner of numerous downtown surface parking lots, one of which is part of the property being eyed for acquisition, possibly through condemnation, for expansion of the Spokane Convention Center.

“If I put the veil on today, I know I could get 600 or 700 more votes.”

– Kuwaiti legislative candidate Rula Dashti, refusing to invoke her Islamic faith as a political issue for her campaign in the first election in which her countrywomen are allowed to vote.

“This is definitely the fastest water we’ve been in. We’ve just been checking out places to swim and this is the closest and the cleanest.”

– Richard Rogers, one of three young men swimming in the swift-running Spokane River on Monday, just downstream from Plantes Ferry Park, where another swimmer was presumed to have drowned the previous evening.

“If they get lost and you get them back one day, one month or six years later, it is worth it.”

Dog owner Annette Wulff, whose boxer Lady was returned to her thanks to implanted microchip identification, nearly six years after disappearing from Wulff’s yard.

“The question is, do you have more faith in the marketplace, or do you have more faith in the finest government planner?”

– Idahoan Laird Maxwell, sponsor of an initiative that would require the state to compensate landowners for diminished property value caused by land-use regulations.

“If you’re going to be sick or disabled and you can’t have fun with it, you might as well give up and die.”

– Former pyrotechnician David Sylvester, who uses fireworks stickers to decorate the leg brace he must wear because of a fireworks accident.

“They’re trying to pin it on this one guy, but I think it’s other people we need to be looking at.”

– Congressman Bob Finer, D-Calif., criticizing Veterans Affairs superiors who let a worker take home the recently recovered software that was stolen, potentially exposing millions of veterans to identify theft.