"...a cult murdering a Congressman and crippling another, an assassination of a Congressman on foreign soil, that is, that got people's attention. As if Latin America didn't have enough attention on it as it were at the time, now a local Congressman is in the hospital, fighting for his life, because of the People's Temple, who all killed themselves within days. Leo Ryan was lucid within two days after being evacuated to Tobago and boy I've never seen anyone that indignantly angry in my life..."
- Former Congressman Harvey Milk, 2008 Interview "Ghosts of Jonestown"
"...tell Marilyn Quayle why her husband, the father of her three children, is dead on a tarmac in Guyana, and the people of Indiana's 4th Congressional District why they don't have representation in Congress right now. Tell the family of my aide, Jackie Speier, why their daughter isn't coming home. The journalists who gave their lives to report on this matter. The families of all those who Jim Jones led into his dark night. Tell them! Go on, tell them! If you won't, I will. For too long, Jones and his "church," if you can even call it that, was indulged by California's political classes. By its elite. A bipartisan consensus to keep Jim Jones happy. Sometimes at arms length, like Governors Reagan and Brown, who just smiled and nodded; sometimes, tight, like Assemblyman Brown, or the Mayor up there in San Francisco, George Moscone. That his people were useful for pamphleting, for canvassing, for getting out the vote, while they turned a blind eye to abuse, to drugs, to violence. Now do you see? Now do you see what happens when we ignore festering evil in our midst, for political expediency? Goddamn, I might never walk again. Was that worth my legs? Congressman Quayle's life? All those people who just killed themselves, alone in the jungles, at the whim of a madman?"
- Congressman Leo Ryan, Hospital Room Interview, Tobago, November 1978
"...the Jonestown killings crippled Moscone. He caved to Supervisor White's demands for his seat back within moments, angering Milk and the progressives; the conservatives who hated him still hated him, the general public hated him, Milk's faction hated him. It was like the city had been decapitated, a city stunned by the events down in Guyana. Ryan had Moscone in his crosshairs but Jerry Brown and Willy Brown, too. Anyone who had let this happen was a target for Ryan's coming crusade..."
- When Love Wasn't Enough: An Oral History of San Francisco in the 1970s
