‘We started it.’

Author and surgeon Atul Gawande on the role of the medical community in America’s opioid epidemic. He told Vox.com in an interview that the overtreatment of pain beginning in the 1990s led to the epidemic: “We weren’t recognizing—I certainly wasn’t recognizing—the extent to which we were putting people at risk.”

‘The dogma lives loudly within you.’

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to federal appeals court nominee Amy Barrett on Feinstein’s concerns about standard Roman Catholic beliefs apparent in speeches Barrett has given. In a letter to Feinstein, Rev. John I. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, wrote, “It is chilling to hear from a United States Senator that this might now disqualify someone from service as a federal judge.”

‘I feel like I’m on the moon. There’s not a single tree standing.’

Emmanuel Renoult of St. Barts, in the Caribbean, on the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma.

‘I’d rather be called a racist than turn a blind eye to child abuse.’

British Labour Party MP Sarah Champion on being labeled racist after she denounced the unwillingness of many to identify the Pakistani Muslim heritage of the gangs that have serially sexually abused girls in Rotherham, Newcastle, and other English cities. In a letter to The Times, a group of British Hindu, Sikh, and Christian leaders defended Champion: “It’s not racist or Islamophobic to raise a matter of significant public concern. Smearing those speaking an inconvenient truth is unacceptable.”

‘There is a collective groan whenever there’s another news cycle about this.’

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., on Democrats’ concerns that Hillary Clinton’s book tour will revisit “the blame game” over Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump.