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A compilation of quotations on a variety of issues by national, state and regional writers, well-known personalities, just plain everyday people and from various publications collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.

Quotes for our Times:

Leah Barkoukis, online features editor at Townhall.com: So that's why Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.

'I was going through something that night, not that that justifies my behavior that night at all,' he said. “There’s many nuances and complexities to it, you know, but at the end of the day, I just — I lost it, you know?”

“I was gone,” he said later in the interview. “That was a rage that had been bottled for a really long time.”

Smith walked on stage during the awards ceremony to slap Rock after he made a joke referencing his wife’s short hair.

Matt Vespa, Senior Editor at Townhall. com: How one 2022 poll is a warning to BOTH parties about working class voters.

Democrats lost these voters when they decided to declare war on every white voter in sight. Republicans reaped the political dividends of this diaspora but have yet to earn their undying loyalty. It reverts to what many voters say about the twoparty system: they’ve abjectly failed to serve the people's interests.

Helen Raleigh, senior contributor to The Federalist and author: China's 'zero-COVID' policy could be Xi's undoing.

Xi likely will respond to this widespread unrest with brutal force and remain in power. Still, this crisis demonstrates that his rule is not as secure as he had believed. History is sometimes full of irony. Xi values personal loyalty and social stability more than anything. But his insistence on forging ahead with a failed policy to deal with a virus that originated from China and likely escaped from a government-funded lab may eventually cost him loyalty and social stability, becoming the beginning of his own undoing.

Greg Gutfeld, host of Gutfeld! and cohost of The Five: Elon Musk took journalists' 'cheat sheets' away.

So it's weird. How did a media come to find a person who's expanding free speech to be so dangerous? Well, this is what happens when one defines disagreeableness as hate speech and hate speech, then, as a crime. Because then free speech becomes a crime for allowing disagreeable speech. So they don't want what Elon wants, which is a town square, unless they could run it like Tiananmen. They wanted a private club with a velvet rope that kept scrubs like you out.

It's why a tiny percentage of Twitter users were responsible for nearly all the tweets. And those are the people you see in panic mode. You know, a rocket scientist named Alyssa Milano, a nuclear physicist named Rob Reiner, a world-renowned heart surgeon named Debra Messing. But it's no surprise they're mad. Now we'll be able to see when their pants are on fire.