The Week in Words: Stimulus up for debate; the beef about restaurants

"We advocated for constituents who had applied for grants."

- U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, regarding the Obama administration's federal stimulus program, which Mitt Romney and Ryan decry.

"I love that. This is such a bad program, and [Ryan] writes me a letter saying . . . we need this stimulus."

- Vice President Joe Biden, during Thursday night's debate with Ryan.

"We think there are more important issues for presidential candidates to talk about than our little funding issue here."

- Patrick Butler, a lobbyist for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, regarding Mitt Romney's pledge to cut funding for PBS.

"I served people, but I couldn't afford to eat where I worked."

- Waitress Victoria Burton, reacting to a report of low wages for food servers in Philadelphia restaurants.

"They paint [the restaurant industry] as evil."

- Patrick Conway, chief executive of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association, regarding the food-servers report.

"The overall trend seems to be that the labor market is improving."

- Brian Kim, of RBS Securities, Stamford, Conn., on the weekly jobless claims report of 339,000, the lowest since February 2008.

"This is a reason to celebrate a company stepping forward to make a public commitment to sharing their data . . . at the patient level and fostering open science."

- Harlan M Krumholz, of the Yale School of Medicine, on GlaxoSmithKline announcing it will share its drug research.

"This is definitely a crossroads."

- David Daoud, analyst at IDC, on a report that the already flagging personal-computer business dropped 8 percent in the third quarter.