QUOTES OF THE WEEK

• “Today, Oscar Pistorius is the largest story in the world, dwarfing Ebola by over 80 percent.” — Media monitoring group ROi Africa commenting on Oscar Pistorius’s sentencing.
• “It will be a sad day if the impression was created that there was one law for the poor and one law for the rich and the famous.” — Judge Thokozile Masipa sentencing Oscar Pistorius to five years in jail for killing Reeva Steenkamp.
• “Yes, he is vulnerable, but he also has excellent coping skills.” — Judge Thokozile Masipa rejecting the defence’s argument that Oscar Pistorius’s handicap is a reason to keep him out of jail.
• “ satisfied with the sentence ... now time to go home.” — Barry Steenkamp after Oscar Pistorius was jailed for five years for killing his daughter Reeva.
• “As an uncle, I hope Oscar will start the healing process as he walks this path and serves the sentence.” — Arnold Pistorius.
• “There is an appetite to appeal and we have 14 days to consider the law, and ensure the facts and the law allow us to appeal.” — NPA spokesman Nathi Mncube commenting on the Oscar Pistorius sentence.
• “He is a little bit tired and tense but the chaplain went to talk to him. He is deurmekaar, as they say in Afrikaans. After he saw the chaplain our psychologist went to see him, just to try talk to him.” — Kgosi Mampuru II area commissioner Zebulon Monama after paralympian Oscar Pistorius was admitted to the prison.

“Shortly after the door closed you could hear the tears... he was torn up. Broken. The crying went on and on. We think he stopped when he fell asleep. It was really bad.” — An unnamed prison source, quoted in The Times, on Oscar Pistorius’s first night in jail.

“He is in good spirits and talking.”— ANC spokesman Zizi Kodwa after MP Jackson Mthembu was shot during a robbery in Witbank.

“We still don’t know. Even as we speak now the laboratory has not given us an update.” — Government spokeswoman Phumla Williams on when the bodies of the South Africans killed in the TB Joshua church guest house collapse in Lagos, Nigeria, on September 12 will be returned to South Africa.