This Week They Said

When the pilot attacked they were military vehicles. If they turned out to be tractors, that is a different issue.

When the pilot attacked they were military vehicles. If they turned out to be tractors, that is a different issue.

- NATO statement on its bombing of the refugee convoy

This is just the kind of own goal we were dreading.

- British official speaking of the convoy bombing

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God knows the truth.

- Patriarch Pavle, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, asked by his country's government to deny that its forces committed atrocities in Kosovo

We would like to nip this conflict in the bud before it destabilises all of Europe. We don't want American soldiers to die on distant battlefields in large numbers.

- President Clinton

Who are these soldiers who are ready to kill and not ready to die?

- Philippe Morillon, retired French general

You can't hold ground by air power . . . [but] by a 17-year-old with a bayonet.

- King Leka, pretender to the Albanian throne

I told [Milosevic] you will see your "Greater Serbia" in a sea of blood and sorrow.

- Joschka Fischer, German Foreign Minister

[Milosevic] told me this would be worse than Vietnam, and I told him you are not Ho Chi Minh.

- Mr Fischer

They had to do their toilet where they sat or stood, old people, women and children, anyone who couldn't hold out.

- Refugee on a bus in Macedonia

A war crime under all legal definitions of the term.

- The Workers' Party, after a passenger train in south-east Serbia was hit in a NATO air attack, killing at least 10

It is full of the stuff we are going through here anyway.

- The Flood tribunal's chief witness, James Gogarty, during a cross-examination on sewage pipe capacity

So that there is no uncertainty or confusion about this, and given the propensity to negotiate through the media, let me make it very clear that Sinn Fein formally rejects the Hillsborough Declaration.

- Sinn Fein chairman Mitchel McLaughlin

I notice that Mitchel McLaughlin has decommissioned his moustache.

- Tony McEvoy, Clane, Co Kildare, in a letter to The Irish Times

I believe we have reached a point where nobody anywhere can dare to threaten us.

- George Fernandes, Indian Defence Minister, on the test flight of a long-range missile

I don't think of myself as an actress. And I didn't think any of you did.

- Elizabeth Taylor on being awarded a BAFTA fellowship

I would slit my wrists rather than hurt a child. I could never do that. No one will ever know how much these wicked rumours have hurt me.

- Singer Michael Jackson, on rumours that he is a child abuser

People tend to think that I'm sad. Like I'm some kind of miserable bastard - I guess because of the way my face is . . . But I'm not. I'm a happy guy. Really. At least, until someone makes me unhappy.

- Actor Nicholas Cage

I thank Allah for letting me fight with one hand and having a heart and then taking him out with the hand that was hurting . . . I've got the heart of a lion and I ain't getting beat.

- Prince Naseem, on his successful title defence against Paul Ingle

This is a vindictive political act. He has placed his ambitions above his duties.

- Baroness Thatcher, on Jack Straw's decision to allow the extradition case against Gen Pinochet to proceed