鈥淲hen I am president, I will end this assault on science. America will once again be the innovation nation.鈥�
Senator Hillary Clinton, speaking at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC on George W. Bush鈥檚 record on science (Reuters, 4 October)
鈥淭here are no easy barrels left. The only barrels are going to be the tough barrels.鈥�
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J. Robinson West, chairman of oil industry consulting firm PFC Energy in Washington DC, on how oil discovery and development costs tripled from 1999 to 2006 (The New York Times, 9 October)
鈥淚t鈥檚 only a matter of time before people will be walking up to our shops and asking for quids for their two weeks in a space hotel.鈥�
A spokesperson for the foreign exchange company Travelex on the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination 鈥� quid 鈥� a currency designed for use by space travellers and currently listed at a rate of 拢6.25 to the quid (BBC online, 5 October)
鈥淢aybe it will say he鈥檚 from Catalonia. Maybe we find his DNA is completely dissimilar to any known DNA. Well, perfect, OK. Then I stop.鈥�
Barcelona architect Francesc Albardaner, who helped fund a genetic analysis of Christopher Columbus鈥檚 origin. He hopes it will prove Columbus was a Catalan (International Herald Tribune online, 8 October)
鈥淢onkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behaviour of women in so many 19th-century novels. Stay loyal to your relatives鈥ut also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.鈥�
Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania in their book Baboon Metaphysics (The New York Times online, 9 October)