Film

They said what?

When I see 44% of the public supporting him on this, it’s not a loss.

John Wright, of Ipsos Reid, commenting on a National Post-sponsored poll testing public support for keeping Canadian troops in occupied Afghanistan till at least 2009

A vote against the Harper government’s cynicism would have been interpreted broadly as a vote against the mission, and would have damaged both soldier morale and Canada’s international reputation.

Scott Brison, Liberal MP and candidate for leadership of that party

She is the perfect embodiment of the great French contradictions. There is about her a delicious perfume of right-wing conservatism within a progressive project.

Paris Match editorial on Ségolene Royal, potential successor to Jacques Chirac

This is a Christian country and you don’t really need that sort of thing here.

This country’s going down the pan.

Anonymous neighbour of a house where Kaotians live in Darlington, England. Kaotians follow the Chronicles of Gor, 26 science fiction novels from the ’60s.

I know that the Australians and others are looking at really focusing on dealing with this through the application of technology and technological development. This is very much the path our government’s looking at.

Stephen Harper, Canadian Prime Minister, on his alternative to Kyoto. Harper failed to send his minister of environment to a climate change conference of engineers in Ottawa. See story in this issue.

We respect the law, and the people who don’t respect the law and barricade the road, [the government] is offering them everything, including rights over our property, which is unprecedented.

Michael Bruder, of Henco Industries, the company trying to build a subdivision on Indian land south of Hamilton

The minister may have come from apes, but we’re Inuit and we’ve always been human.

Molly Tayara, an Inuit instructor at Salluit, Quebec, after the school was told by the government to teach the theory of evolution

Like many countries, Canada is today suffering from the pervasive effects of secularism. . . . One of the more dramatic symptoms of this mentality . . . is the plummeting birth rate.

Pope Benedict XVI

We were going to give England the smell of tea, but then we assigned green tea to Japan, and so England got the After Eight [mint], a cult symbol of Englishness for Germans.

Ernst-Adolf Hinrichs, German perfume maker who helped set up a smell tour of soccer’s World Cup competitors