"Professor Yuan Longping's pioneering research has helped transform China from food deficiency to food security within three decades. His accomplishments and clear vision helped create a more abundant food supply and, through food security, a more stable world."

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization

"First we must have enough food, then comes eating well."

Yuan Longping, talking about his firm belief in the importance of food security for developing countries

"We now have $1.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, and I tell my foreign friends I have never been under more pressure."

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, describing China's huge foreign exchange reserves as a symbol of both strength and huge responsibility when he delivered a speech at the National University of Singapore on November 19

"Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas oncentrations were to be stabilized."

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its report released on November 17

"This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone-the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane."

Dr. Robert Lanza, who owns a company engaged in the research of stem cell cloning, after scientists in the United States and Japan created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells from ordinary skin cells, a breakthrough that could someday produce new treatments for disease without the explosive moral questions of embryo cloning

"They get our oil and give us a worthless piece of paper."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blaming U.S. President George W. Bush's policies for the decline of the dollar and its negative effect on other countries, when he addressed the media after the close of the summit of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries on November 18

"Cooking this data would be almost impossible."

Dr. Paul De Lay, Unaids's director of monitoring and policy, replying to the idea that earlier estimates of people infected with HIV were deliberately inflated. After releasing new figures on November 21 showing that the global AIDS epidemic is smaller than it previously reported, the AIDS-fighting agency denied that it had inflated estimates for years in an alarmist effort to raise funds