Perry, Cornyn, Dewhurst, Buckner, and Burciaga

Gov. Rick Perry at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference: "Republicans got frustrated. They got frustrated because we elected men and women who said, you know, 'Elect us and we're going to go to Washington, D.C. with an R behind our names.' And they went to Washington, D.C. and we ended up couldn't tell the difference between whether they were Republicans or Democrats. That's what happened to the Republican Party."

Perry, on accepting federal stimulus money, during a sit-down for Newsweek and The Texas Tribune: “We Texans send billions of dollars to Washington, D.C., in the form of federal gas taxes and income taxes. These are Texas-earned, Texas-generated dollars — monumental amounts of money, substantially more than flows back into this state. So the idea that we’re going to be purer than pure and not take any money back because it’s been identified as stimulus dollars? These are our dollars. This is our money."

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, talking about Scott Brown, the new guy in the Senate, in The Wall Street Journal: "Everyone expected him to be not a Texas Republican but a Massachusetts Republican, and they are not the same thing."

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst on the possible ramifications of health care reform, at the anti-Obamacare rally at the Capitol: “We’re either going to dramatically increase our taxes in Texas or we’re going to have to cut back in programs like public education, like higher education, like public safety, like transportation, and that’s unacceptable.”

Luana Buckner, the chairman of the Edwards Aquifer Authority’s board of directors, on the upcoming Texas Supreme Court decision in EAA v. Day, in The Texas Tribune: “This is the water case in the state of Texas. The opinion that’s going to come out of this court — I can’t even think of the superlative to use to describe it. The amount of nail biting that is going on over it is just phenomenal. This ownership issue is at the heart of every major groundwater issue that’s being talked about across the state.”

Vicente Burciaga, telling The New York Times why he fled from El Porvenir, Mexico, to the U.S.: "It’s very hard over there. They are killing people over there who have nothing to do with drug trafficking. They kill you just for having seen what they are doing."