Perspectives

"We used to fight about who gets to keep the house. Now we fight about who gets stuck with the dead cow."
Gary Nickelson, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, on how the real-estate-market crash is making divorce more contentious

"There's a 55–45 percent chance right now that disintegration will occur."
Igor Panarin, the dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's diplomat academy, who has predicted the demise of the United States by the year 2010

"I'm in Australia, I think it's important to help out, you know, the economy out here, everywhere in the world."
Paris Hilton, in Sydney, after being criticized by local charities for spending $3,844 in a 40-minute shopping spree

"I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."
Former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who is writing a book about his service in the Bush administration

"It's something I'm thinking about more and more. George Washington."
President Mikheil Saakashvili, of Georgia, who once modeled himself on a Georgian king, but now looks to an American "who could have been a king" but chose to create a democracy instead

"It pounds in everybody's conscience every day. Fifty years is something very hard to accept."
Ramon Saul Sanchez, 54, the founder of Movimiento Democracia, a Cuban-American opposition group, on the half-century anniversary of the Cuban Revolution