Verbatim: Nov. 27, 2006

"The Iranian nation possesses the full nuclear fuel cycle, and time is completely running in our favor in terms of diplomacy."

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, President of Iran, explaining that he expects his country's uranium-enrichment program to be ready by March 2007

"Hope is not a strategy."

HILLARY CLINTON, Democratic New York Senator, to General John Abizaid, top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, during Abizaid's testimony before the Senate and House Armed Services Committee

"Senator, I agree with you--and I would also say that despair is not a method."

GENERAL ABIZAID, in response

"I consider this his confession."

JUDITH REGAN, head of ReganBooks, defending her imprint's decision to publish If I Did It, former football star O.J. Simpson's controversial account of how, hypothetically, he could have killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman

"All of the illegal-alien protesters are waving Mexican flags, and we just got tired of it."

PAUL WILLIS, Pahrump, Nev., board clerk, spelling out why the town passed a new law making it illegal to fly a foreign nation's flag by itself

"I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist."

SACHA BARON COHEN, British comedian and star of the wildly popular film Borat, in which Baron Cohen's character maintains, among other absurdities, that Kazakh women are kept in cages

Sources: CNN; Newsday (2); AP; Reuters; Rolling Stone