Verbatim

"Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you." RICHARD CLARKE, former counterterrorism chief for Presidents Clinton and Bush, opening his testimony to the 9/11 committee by apologizing to families of the victims of the attacks

"Those weapons of mass destruction have to be here somewhere ... Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here ..." PRESIDENT BUSH, at a dinner for radio and TV correspondents, as he showed slides of himself looking under furniture in the White House--a joke that drew protests from Democrats and some family members of soldiers in Iraq

"If he were older than 18 years old, then maybe. Maybe I would encourage him. But sending this boy--it is not acceptable." TAMAM ABDU, speaking about the men who enlisted her 16-year-old son Hussam to attempt a suicide bombing; authorities stopped him at a checkpoint in Israel, discovered his bomb and defused it

"You are looking good. You are still young." COLONEL MUAMMAR GADDAFI, Libya's leader, to Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, when the two met near Tripoli, ending three decades of Libyan isolation

"At the Times, as at Harvard, it is hard to get in and almost impossible to flunk out." HOWELL RAINES, former New York Times executive editor, writing in the Atlantic Monthly about the Times culture that he tried to change before the Jayson Blair scandal forced his resignation

"She can't live at home, she can't live with relatives, she can't go to school or talk to her friends." THE MOTHER OF KOBE BRYANT'S ACCUSER, in a letter to Judge W. Terry Ruckriegle, complaining that press attention has disrupted her daughter's life and pleading that he speed up the trial

"All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me--consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected." DONALD TRUMP, on a side benefit of his hit TV series

Sources: New York Times; New York Daily News (2); New York Times; USA Today; New York Times; New York Daily News