Verbatim

'What is important is not the amount but that North Korea accepted it.'

CHOI JIN-WOOK, a North Korea expert in Seoul, on shipments of rice and instant noodles being sent to North Korea from South Korea as part of an aid package to help the famine-hit North

'These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the '80s.'

AARON SORKIN, screenwriter of The Social Network, acknowledging that the film, which purportedly tells the story of Facebook's founding, is sexist toward women because he was trying to depict a "deeply misogynistic group of people"

'You can get drunk for $5 all night.'

CHRISTINE BINKO, a Boston student, on the appeal of caffeinated alcoholic drinks; students at colleges in New Jersey and Washington State were recently hospitalized after consuming too many of the beverages, which are under review by the FDA

'He thinks that democracy stands in his way.'

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, former Soviet leader, chastising Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for being too authoritarian

'We ... simply have to ensure that public confidence in deepwater drilling is restored.'

ROBERT DUDLEY, chief executive of BP, defending potentially dangerous deepwater drilling in the U.S., in his first external address since taking the top job

'States have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers.'

POPE BENEDICT XVI, speaking at the World Day of Migrants and Refugees; although he also defended migrants' right to be treated with dignity, the Pope made his comments at a time when the place of minorities in Europe is falling under scrutiny

'This prize belongs to everyone, everyone who is Chinese and has been fearless in defending their dignity.'

LIU XIA, wife of jailed Chinese Nobel Prize--winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, inviting 143 Chinese activists and academics to the award ceremony in Oslo; she remains under house arrest

TALKING HEADS

Peter Beinart

Telling conservatives to stop trying to strip National Public Radio of funding for its perceived liberal biases, on the Daily Beast:

"The people who run the station believe that Americans should know more about what is happening in China and less about what is happening to Britney Spears ... Folks like Palin want America to grow more and more economically integrated with other countries and they want America to keep invading them ... Shouldn't we keep funding NPR, so someone can tell Americans where those countries actually are?"

--10/25/10

Gideon Rachman

On why China should stop acting as if it's poor, in the Financial Times:

"China's insistence that it is a poor, developing nation is beginning to wear a little thin. This, after all, is a country that is sitting on more than [$2.5 trillion] worth of foreign reserves ... Its insistence that it is still a 'developing country' has become a shield to protect itself against vital political and economic changes that matter profoundly to the rest of the world."