The month of January gets its name from Janus, the Roman god of gates, doorways, and transitions (beginnings/endings). Artists depicted Janus with two faces – or sometimes two heads – which looked both forward and back. At year’s end, we look behind us at the previous year, with lists of the best movies, best books, most important news stories, and so on. We also look ahead, with soon-to-be-forgotten lists of resolutions for the new year.

In the spirit of Janus, I’ve looked back and collected some memorable quotes from 2009, with two bonus quotes from previous years. I tried to pin down the exact dates, but I missed a few. Some of the quotes might inspire or disgust you. Others might make you laugh. I thought about explaining the quotes or putting the important parts in bold, but then I chose not to clutter up the list. So, here they are, memorable quotes from 2009, in no particular order:

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

  – Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone, 7/13/09)

“Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There’s a word for this: it’s evil.”

  – Paul Krugman (NY Times, 4/22/09)

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“You’ll have lots of ‘splainin’ to do.”

  – Sen. Tom Coburn, doing an ill-considered impersonation of Desi Arnaz (Sotomayor confirmation hearings, 7/15/09)

“This is for my friend Ted Kennedy.”

  – Sen. Robert Byrd (after voting for the health care bill, 12/24/09)

“No matter what Michael wanted, someone would give it [to him]. The very rich, the very poor, and the very famous get the worst medical care.”

  – Dr Arnold Klein, Michael Jackson’s dermatologist (ABC News, 7/8/09)

“You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney, and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”

  – Jesse Ventura (CNN, 5/11/09)

“If I could speak the language of rabbits, they would be amazed, and I would be their king. I would be kind to my rabbit subjects … at first.”

  – Raj (from the TV show “The Big Bang Theory”)

“Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare!”

  – Some teabagger (somewhere, whenever)

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the NHS [National Health Service]. I have received a large amount of high quality treatment, without which I would not have survived.”

  – Professor Stephen Hawking (The Guardian, 8/11/09)

“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.”

  – Pres. Barack Obama (inauguration speech, 1/20/09)

“Daddy, the plane turned into a boat.”

  – Four-year-old daughter of Martin Sosa (on board the USAir plane that ditched in the Hudson River, 1/15/09)

“Finally, a guy who says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking.”

  – Jon Stewart’s cogent summary of Glenn Beck (“The Daily Show”)

“I have trouble listening to what he [Cheney] says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking.”

  – Rep. Alan Grayson (Hardball, 10/22/09)

“You lie!”

  – Rep. Joe Wilson (during Obama’s speech to a joint session, 9/9/09)

“I hope he fails.”

  – Rush Limbaugh, talking about Obama (1/16/09)

“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job.”

  – John Wayne, talking about JFK (way back in 1960)

“We are the only advanced country in the world that has chosen to leave health care to the tender mercies of a panoply of for-profit businesses, whose purpose is to maximize income and not to provide health. And that’s exactly what they do.”

  – Marcia Angell (Bill Moyers Journal, 7/24/09)

“At least he died doing what he loved most: blogging on the Huffington Post.”

  – Kenneth (from the TV show “30 Rock”)

“We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”

  – Dana Perino, Bush’s former Press Secretary (Fox News, 11/24/09)

“Arguing with you is like having an argument with my dining room table.”

  – Rep. Barney Frank (at a town hall meeting, after someone compared Obama to Hitler)

“Did he just say ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’ in Klingon?”

  – Wil Wheaton/Wesley Crusher (on the TV show “The Big Bang Theory”)

“I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.”

  – Carrie Prejean (Miss USA Pageant, 4/20/09)

“I believe marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers.”

  – Tina Fey as Sarah Palin (“Saturday Night Live,” and yeah, I know it’s from 2008)

“It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”

  – Anderson Cooper (CNN, 4/14/09)

“When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to one day live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married.”

  – Dustin Lance Black (acceptance speech after winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, 2/22/09)

See The Lives They Lived, 2009, The New York Times Magazine, December 27, 2009:

Each year newspapers and magazines document the lives and deaths of hundreds of notable people. And each year we put together a special issue that peeks into some of those lives — an admittedly eclectic, idiosyncratic project, one driven by the passions, quirks and curiosities of our writers and editors. This year those interests led us to some very well known names but also to many lesser-known ones, each worthy, in one way or another, of exploration and appreciation.