Quotes of the Year: 'Take my soul ... but the struggle continues'

What I don't understand is how a Frenchman can be playing for Manchester United. He's not even from England. They employ him to play football for them, not to go round hitting people - Lord Denning on Eric Cantona

In the early days privatisation signified liberty, equity, prosperity. Now it's just a bunch of slobs stinging the consumer and putting each other's salaries up over a heavy lunch - Alan Clark

What is this thing called the EU which is sending ultimatums on our behalf to Her Majesty's subjects in Canada? - Letter to the 'Daily Telegraph'

If I'd been told in the early 1980s that 10 years later a Labour leader was to send his child to a grant-maintained school, I would have said that was about as likely as Mrs Thatcher applying to join the NUM - John Patten, former Tory minister

I'm the fall guy - I only blew pounds 200m - Nick Leeson, to a friend

He supported Clause IV, won four elections and worked with the left. It was an extraordinary achievement -

Tony Benn on Harold Wilson, who died in May

A feminist of the younger school ... fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage ... So much lipstick must rot the brain - Germaine Greer, on her fellow columnist Suzanne Moore

My government is a coalition - John Major to Helmut Kohl, German Chancellor, overhead by a rogue microphone at the G7 summit in Canada

People no longer accept that old crazy logic that to get the rich to work harder you must pay them more, while to get the poor to work harder you have to pay them less - Leif Mills, TUC president

Our politics seem to me to be increasingly about the management of illusions and I possess no talent for soothing and sweet-talking the public like infants - George Walden explains why he will stand down as a Tory MP

As a scientist rather than a sociologist I am prepared to risk political incorrectness by drawing attention to the seemingly obvious but under- stressed fact that black sprinters, and black athletes in general, all seem to have certain natural anatomical advantages - Sir Roger Bannister

What is happening to the world I know? Prostitutes? In Godalming? I can't believe it - Sir Ronald Millar, playwright, political speechwriter, and Old Carthusian on Peter Hobson, disgraced headmaster of Charterhouse

[The broadcast] would have to be moitie-moitie, wouldn't it? - The Queen, asked to appear on Canadian television by a hoaxer claiming to be the Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien

There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded - The Princess of Wales on 'Panorama'

I can say we achieved half our goal - we have half of Bosnia, more than 40 cities and some good land - Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, on the peace deal

Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues - Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian Ogoni rights activist, before he was hanged in Port Harcourt in November

The brain is the central erogenous zone for me, and he's got a big one - Marianne Wiggins, author, on Salman Rushdie, her former husband

Bloody typical. The wife's sent home early and he stays on - Dublin woman on the Clintons' visit to Cassidy's pub

The House of Commons is dead and to a large extent irrelevant. It is no longer the forum of the nation - Lord Weatherill, former Speaker