Verbatim

"Despite sincere and altruistic motivation, the Legislative and Executive branches of our government have acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people--our Constitution."

STANLEY BIRCH, a conservative judge in Atlanta's federal appeals court, rebuking the President and Congress for behaving like "activist judges" in intervening in the Terri Schiavo case

"It could have been a Bible, an A.C.L.U. policy guide, Mein Kampf, whatever. You just can't bring something in that hasn't been admitted into evidence by a judge."

RONALD CHEN, Rutgers University law professor, explaining why the Colorado Supreme Court reduced convicted murderer Robert Harlan's sentence from death to life in prison because jurors consulted the Bible during deliberations

"Just let me finish this point."

WILLIAM KRISTOL, neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, undaunted when a student splattered a pie in his face during a speech at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind.

"The best we can get is the status quo. The crisis continues."

LOVEMORE MADHUKU, chairman of the pro-democracy National Constitutional Assembly in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled with an increasingly strong hand since 1980, was re-elected amid allegations of vote rigging

"The people here are suffering. We have to eat bananas from the jungle. We get rice provided by the government, but it is not enough."

MAHAYATI INADIMAN, Indonesian woman, 27, in the aftermath of an 8.7-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 500 people in Sumatra, which had barely recovered from the December tsunami

"I understand I am, putting it mildly, a controversial figure."

PAUL WOLFOWITZ, a former Deputy Defense Secretary and a chief architect of the Iraq war, upon his confirmation as president of the World Bank, stressing his intention to be more collaborative

Sources: AP; Denver Post; Chicago Tribune; AP (2); Los Angeles Times