Verbatim

"They think it's circus-like." --MERRELL FRANKEL, social-studies teacher, on her middle-school students' take on California's gubernatorial recall election

"You were agreeing with the very plan that Newt Gingrich wanted to pass, which was a $270 billion cut in Medicare." RICHARD GEPHARDT, Missouri Congressman and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, to opponent Howard Dean, during a candidates' debate in New York City

"Nobody up here deserves to be compared to Newt Gingrich." HOWARD DEAN, responding to Gephardt's comments

"We don't want Iraq to become a breeding ground for terrorism." PAUL BREMER, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, at a Pentagon news conference

"Bill and I debated whether we should attend a ceremony in Tiananmen Square, where Chinese authorities had used tanks to forcibly suppress pro-democracy demonstrations in June of 1989." HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, Democratic Senator from New York and former First Lady, in a passage from her best-selling memoir, Living History, which was expunged, along with several others, from the Chinese edition

"You can't run the N.Y.S.E. like a club, or you won't have the confidence of the public." JOHN REED, interim chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, on the need for reform, following the resignation of former chairman Richard Grasso

"I still like a Bud." JACQUES CHIRAC, French President, who once worked at an Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis, Mo., on his fondness for the U.S., despite strains in French-American relations over the war in Iraq

Sources: Los Angeles Times; CNBC (2); AP; New York Times/Simon & Schuster; Washington Post; USA Today