The 40th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) with the theme "improve the state of the world: rethink, redesign, rebuild," kicked off Wednesday in the Swiss skiing resort of Davos, attracting some 2,500 leaders worldwide, representing business, government, civil society, academia and the media.

The forum opened its first day of discussions with the focus on how to improve the regulation of the financial sector to avoid future crisis, whether global economy could recover sustainably, as well as how to rebuild the quake-torn Haiti.

The following are some quotable quotes made at the WEF on Wednesday:

On economic crisis

"The crisis has fundamentally changed our world and we can no longer revert to the old system...This means concretely rethinking our values, redesigning our systems and rebuilding our institutions." -- Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF

"Significant work must be done to rebuild a true partnership between governments and business to allow business to remain innovative and enterprising and to create jobs." -- Schwab

"It will be a U-shaped recovery ... and there is a risk of a double-dip recession." -- Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics Monitor, USA.

On financial reforms

"We will continue to make our economy run risks greater than it can bear, to encourage speculation and to sacrifice our long-term future, if we do not change the regulation of our banking system and the rules for accounting." -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy

"We need to fix the right types of changes ... and we should not overreact or rush to short-term actions that may sound good or may grab headlines but quite frankly would not serve the fundamental problems all of us need to address." -- Dennis Nally, global chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers

"We need good regulation, better regulation but not more regulation." -- Lord Levene, chairman of British bank Lloyd

"We could over-regulate and go too far and whittle away too much." -- Raghuram Rajan, an expert from the University of Chicago School of Business.

On reconstruction in Haiti

"It is the most complicated catastrophe we have ever been confronted (with)." -- Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program

"We have to build them a private economy. They do not want to live on aid forever. They want to go to work and have a chance to build their own dreams. And we need private sector investment to do that." -- Former U.S.President Bill Clinton.

(Xinhua News Agency January 28, 2010)