Verbatim

'Most compelling is that you lied to this court [and] continue to lie, after you pleaded guilty to lying.'

DAVID GRONER, the judge who sentenced former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to up to five years in prison for violating the terms of his probation stemming from a perjury conviction

'These parents are not going away, the children are not going to go away, and I most certainly am not going away.'

ANDREW WAKEFIELD, a surgeon barred from practicing in Britain on May 24 after his 1998 study suggesting a link between a common vaccine and autism was deemed "irresponsible" by the country's General Medical Council

'These five paintings are unsellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles. Now return them.'

PIERRE CORNETTE DE SAINT-CYR, director of the Palais de Tokyo, on the theft of paintings--including major works by Picasso and Matisse--from the Paris Museum of Modern Art

'If this opportunity is lost, I doubt the Iranian nation will give a new chance to this gentleman in the future.'

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, Iranian President, referring to Barack Obama and urging him to support a recent nuclear-fuel swap deal or risk permanently losing Iran's cooperation

'She's fantastic on this album.'

PHIL SPECTOR, on his wife Rachelle's first record, which he produced despite being in prison for murder

'This debunks the myth that firearm death is a big-city problem.'

MICHAEL NANCE, lead author of a study finding that children in the U.S.'s most rural areas are just as likely to die as a result of gun violence as kids in the nation's largest cities

'This could only be the work of a committee; it screams CC'd creativity.'

A.A. GILL, columnist, on the newly unveiled 2012 London Olympic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville

TALKING HEADS

Jan Maxwell

A Tony-nominated actress waxing nostalgic in the New York Times after Law & Order's cancellation:

"I killed someone ... in 1994 ... and every three years after that ... I wasn't moonlighting as an assassin, though, but as an actress on NBC's Law & Order. For two decades the show has been a staple gig for New York actors, a reliable way to make money between stage roles ... Law & Order quickly became a part of our lives ... In the early days we would gather religiously to see our friends as killers, punks and occasional dead bodies. We claimed the show as our own."

--5/21/10

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook co-founder and CEO apologizing for recent privacy oversteps, in the Washington Post:

"The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark. We have heard the feedback."

--5/24/10

Garrison Keillor