He was more or less acting like Senator George Mitchell.
- Solicitor Hugh Campbell, on his client, Joseph Joyce, of Farnagh, Moate, Co Westmeath, who was found in possession of three timber bats on his way to "mediate" in a Travellers' row
He was hardly going to play rounders or baseball.
- Judge James O'Sullivan, on Mr Joyce
We had almost become cynical about the degree of impunity for terrible acts of torture and violence around the world.
- UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, on the House of Lords' extradition ruling on Pinochet
He would rather kill himself or be killed by his guards than face the humiliation and indignity of being sent to face trial in Spain.
- Rafael Pinochet Savedra (52), a nephew of the former dictator
We feel the delicate process of transition taking place in Chile for several years has been a very successful one and we don't want it disrupted.
- Jose Miguel Insulza, Chilean Foreign Minister
I am looking forward to a life of leisure.
- Lord Cranborne, after he was sacked by Conservative Party leader, William Hague, as the party's leader in the House of Lords
It's due to Oscar Wilde that today we can celebrate a society that generally appreciates diversity.
- Stephen Fry, actor and writer
This Budget tells us, as poor people, what the destruction and despair in our lives and our communities had already told us: you can, and will, wait forever.
- The Unemployed Workers' Group, Dun Laoghaire and Bray
Every Budget has to have a lighter element. This year it is a budget for the punter . . . Keeping the bets in Ireland is another way of keeping the racecourses open. I look forward to my next flutter at even keener odds.
- The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern
I quite honestly could have killed this man.
- The father of a young girl - who cannot be named for legal reasons - referring to a music teacher from south Dublin who sexually assaulted the girl during lessons in his home
Marie was a harmless, lovely caring person, and one has to question where it is all going to stop.
- Spokeswoman for the National Association of Widows in Ireland Sheila Conroy, on her fellow member Marie Dillon, who was murdered at her home in Finglas
I have experienced death before - I lost a three-month-old baby, and most of my own family have passed away - but your own child, and a murder, and not knowing who or why . . . Only a parent who has a child missing could feel worse.
- Nora Costello, the mother of Galway city taxi-driver Eileen Costello-O'Shaughnessy
"Surely you don't go to Mass, surely you don't send your child to a Catholic school?" These are the chants of the newly rich, half-educated conformists of presentday Ireland with no past, no future, and a present where two people, usually women, are murdered on average every week in comparison to one every two years in the 1940s and 1950s.
- Mgr Denis Faul
I'm friendly with him, but I don't think I've ever had a true connective conversation with him. I just can't. I'm still too much in the "jeepers creepers, he's talking to me" kind of thing.
- The actor Tom Hanks, on President Clinton
Writing removes burdens from your mind. You solve things. You realise how it should have been. It is the supreme catalyst.
- Novelist Lillian Roberts Finlay
Pinochet has earned the right to be called the most evil man now alive on earth. Sorry Saddam.
- Novelist Salman Rushdie
Obviously we can't go ahead with a plan that's illegal, but in the absence of our initiative, we would appeal to people to come to taxi-sharing arrangements themselves and make sure that no cab leaves the rank with only one person in it.
- John Ussher, president of the Irish Taxi Drivers' Federation, on the scrapping of a plan to introduce cab sharing
I don't think anyone will be impressed by the Minister's folksy parable with which he ended his speech yesterday about putting money away for the rainy day. Every family knows that if the roof is leaking, if a child needs new shoes, if the baby needs medical treatment, they will spend the money.
- The Democratic Left leader, Proinsias De Rossa