They said it in May

"Recruiters want students to be equipped to lead, but they don’t want them to lead."

Laura D'Andrea Tyson dean London Business School in Businessworld (May 9)

"There are perhaps few jobs in the world which are similar to that of a collector in an Indian district in terms of professional challenge."

Prime minister Manmohan Singh (May 20)

"When we were surrounded by nuclear-armed countries, we didn’t have any alternative but to become a nuclear weapon state… India will never be a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction."

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in Moscow (May 23)

"We have an obligation to keep prices stable. Inflation has entered the vocabulary of the common man."

Finance minister P. Chidambaram (May 24)

"The most breathtaking contradiction of the past week was Mr. Blair’s demand for respect: for everyone except those whose lives we are destroying. We might no longer be allowed to wear hooded tops in public places, but we will remain free to kill the people of south Asia."

George Monbiot in The Guardian (May 24)

"The conventional textbook is a reference book, stuffed with information, offering no room to think for oneself or for interdisciplinary linkages. The questions given don’t provoke or inspire critical reflection."

Krishna Kumar, director of NCERT, in The Times of India (May 25)

"Two decades of abysmal governance by Laloo and Rabri have turned the state (Bihar) into what some people have cruelly but accurately described as a criminal enterprise."

Columnist Tavleen Singh in Deccan Herald (May 27)

"The presence of foreign students was part of the vibrancy of the American campus. That has been affected by the new rules and regulations."

Margaret Levi, president of the American Political Science Association in The Hindu (May 30)

"The United Progressive Alliance has no sense of how serious things are in the countryside. It seems to have forgotten what and who brought it to power."

P. Sainath writing in The Hindu (May 30)