It's got to be fun to me… it's only a personal peccadillo – it's no more than that.
"If you are seeing someone with these kinds of objects, it is only a personal thing, for personal use," he said.
Mr Fischer's speech was more ambitious, and more intriguing, but he stressed that it was only a "personal", not an official, view, which is unusual for a foreign minister, to say the least.
Mr Sarkozy insisted he had been given the go-ahead by an independent ethics committee, though it turned out that this was only a personal opinion from the committee's president the committee itself has yet to meet.
His relentless prosecution of his parental abandonment and his wild historicizing of what is only a personal fate give him license to decoct an uneasy mixture of Rousseau and Schopenhauer.
But he was careful to say that this was "only a personal opinion," because he is not willing to take on the bill's sponsors: the Northern League, an allied party that once advocated secession of Italy's more prosperous north.
But the presence of Mr. Spann's family seemed a sharp rebuke to any suggestion that Mr. Lindh's joining the Taliban had been only a personal, spiritual quest without consequences or victims.
For me, and again it is only a personal view, the choice of words reflects not only their actual meaning but what they imply, and calling Marine Le Pen a 'fascist' is akin to calling her a Nazi and I don't think that, at the current time, would be fair or accurate.
"This is only a personal opinion, but in the National Guard, we deal with civilians a little better," said Lt. John K. Bahrami, a computer consultant for I.B.M. and a member of the 49th Armored Division, who serves in the unit overseeing security here at Eagle Base, the American headquarters near the town of Tuzla.
"At the beginning it was only a personal attack - it was Platini against me," said Blatter.
