They said it in January

"Today’s politicians are not committed to constructive change. The only change they seem committed to is name changes, such as changing a powerful global brand like Bangalore to Bengaluru."

Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar at the convocation ceremony of Pune University (January 8)

"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government."

"If you are not borrowing from the IMF, there is no particular reason why you should be paying any particular interest to what it says."

Sir Howard Davies director of the London School of Economics in The Hindu (January 23)

"Several colleagues in our party have a lavish lifestyle. We give the impression that our sympathy for the poor is a joke."

Sonia Gandhi, Congress president (January 23)

"The Hamas statute does not call for the destruction of Israel. In Arabic, it says: ‘End the Israeli occupation of Palestine’. We don’t want to eliminate them, only to obtain our rights."

Khaled Meshaal, leader of the Palestinian Islamist group, Hamas (January 27)

"The antics of the fashionable Left ensconced in their bourgeois ways of life make one believe that the Indian Naxalites in their jungle hideouts are, after all, honest. They live what they preach, pursuing their misguided and ultimately doomed efforts to overthrow a thriving, modern and widely admired democracy, believing that what Mao Zedong did in a backward, feudal and authoritarian country can be replicated."

Amulya Ganguli in the Asian Age (January 27)

"In Asia, we have a very weak political leadership. China’s foreign policy is difficult to understand, India’s tragically very pro-American. The Japanese are not allowed a foreign policy of their own. And the rest of the Asian continent stumbles along."