Quotable

"I selected this song because it has been a favorite of mine since I was a child. It was selected for no other reason but for the beauty of its melody. I am, first and foremost, an artist."

Lang Lang, a 28-year-old pianist, wrote on his website, responding to people's doubts that his playing of the Chinese patriotic ballad, My Motherland, at the state dinner for President Hu Jintao held at the White House on Jan 20, was politically motivated.

"In fact, the US would benefit more from the Chinese way of parenting as nowadays more top students in well-off urban China choose the US for higher education and future employment."

Liu Pengzhi, headmaster of the high school affiliated to Renmin University of China, one of the top high schools in Beijing, asking upset Americans to ease their anxieties about the superiority of traditional Chinese parenting over the Western kind.

"The discovery of the one-fingered dinosaur only reconfirms the fact that digital reduction is a striking evolutionary phenomenon, far more complicated than we've expected."

Xu Xing

Xu Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, viewing the rare solitary digit as evidence that the evolution of dinosaurs was more complex than people earlier believed, after the discovery of the dinosaur species recently discovered near the Yellow River.