'I have let my family down, and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.'
TIGER WOODS, in a statement, responding to allegations that he had conducted an extramarital affair. The rumors were fueled by a mysterious one-car accident, supposedly triggered by a domestic spat, outside the golfer's Florida estate on Nov. 27
'I'm keeping my champagne on ice.'
ROLF HEUER, director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on refraining from celebrating after the Large Hadron Collider broke the record for proton acceleration on Nov. 30, sending the particles hurtling at an energy of 1.18 trillion electron volts
'He stole my technique.'
MUNTAZER AL-ZAIDI, the Iraqi journalist who spent nine months in prison for throwing his shoes at former President George W. Bush in 2008, joking after a fellow journalist hurled his shoe at al-Zaidi. The assailant accused him of "working for dictatorship"
'Afghans regard war only as an attempt to enslave them.'
VICTOR YERMAKOV, a Soviet-army commander who fought in Afghanistan during the '80s, arguing that the U.S. is waging an "unwinnable" campaign
'It's almost as if Iran is trying to parody a gratuitously cruel, dictatorial regime.'
KARIM SADJADPOUR, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, responding to reports that the Iranian government confiscated the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize of Shirin Ebadi (right). Iranian officials have denied the accusation
'A woman who had everything lost her life to have a slightly firmer behind.'
ROBERTO PIAZZA, a friend of Solange Magnano, a former Miss Argentina, who died Nov. 29 of a pulmonary embolism after undergoing an elective gluteoplasty in Buenos Aires
'Every movie I've ever been in, I just avoid.'
ALEC BALDWIN, vowing to quit acting in 2012 because he considers his big-screen career a "complete failure," during an interview to promote his new film, It's Complicated
TALKING HEADS
Paul Krugman
Urging the government to work to combat the soaring U.S. unemployment rate in the New York Times:
"If you're looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings ... You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity ... This is wrong and unacceptable." --11/29/09
Harry Shearer
Criticizing the White House gate crashers' reality-TV aspirations on the Huffington Post:
"This should be the year that made clear the distinction between the publicity-hungry, irremediably ego-needy actual denizens of show business (like myself) and the way more grotesquely hungry and ego-needy residents of the show-business underworld known charitably as 'reality TV' ... It was obvious something was adrift, or ajar, when the phrase 'reality-TV star' began to be written and uttered with no trace of irony." --11/27/09
Ross Douthat