"The World Expo 2010 Shanghai is not profit-oriented, and it would be better if we can strike a balance between income and expenditure."

Yang Xiong, Executive Vice Mayor of Shanghai Municipality, commenting on reports the Expo would bring a windfall

"We must do everything we can to get water by taking measures such as artificial precipitation, digging wells and finding new water sources."

Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu, urging local governments on April 1 to make provision of drinking water for people in drought-hit southwest China a top priority

"We have twisted the heads off the most hateful bandits. But this is not enough, by all accounts. We will track down and punish all of them."

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, at a visit to the North Caucasus Republic of Dagestan on April 1, promising a tough response to recent terrorist attacks in Moscow

"We are going where nobody has been before. We have opened a new territory for physics."

Oliver Buchmueller, a scientist with the European Center for Nuclear Research, expressing his excitement after the Large Hadron Collider produced its first high-energy collisions

"There's no real economy. It's a bubble economy."

Lin Mingkun, manager of a yacht club in Hainan Province, talking on the rampant property market speculation in Hainan island two months after the government decision to build Hainan into an international tourist destination in January