The Week in Words: 'From a crawl to walking speed'

"We are heading in the right direction. The economy is going from a crawl to walking speed. It isn't a trot or a gallop, but it is a faster pace."

- Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics L.L.C.

"There have been far too many allegations of misconduct by the principals of this entity. I've been depleted of any confidence that Mr. Freeman is the right person to oversee it."

- Chief Bankruptcy Court Judge Stephen Raslavich, ordering the sale of Germantown Settlement's holdings and criticizing its president, Emanuel V. Freeman.

"This is not the outcome we desired. The economic model that we try to maintain is to bring down health-care costs. This particular location was the anomaly to that model."

- Express Scripts Inc. spokesman Larry Zarin, on the closure of a Bensalem plant.

"Yes, by the accident of geography, my father's house was at 18th and Diamond Streets [in North Philadelphia]. But the standards of my father's house were universal in that he believed in hard work and the importance of education."

- Kenneth C. Frazier, named the new chief executive officer of Merck & Co. Inc., the nation's second-largest drug manufacturer.

"It's quite clear that businesses have reached the limit on how much work they can squeeze out of their existing workforce. As businesses hire more, the productivity numbers will be weaker for a time." - Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight Inc.

"As it stands . . . a number of member-states are effectively insolvent and caught in a vicious circle. The collapse of economic growth has devastated tax revenues, while deflation threatens to push up the real value of their debts."

- Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in London, in a note about troubled eurozone countries.