This paper is concerned with global asymptotic stabilization of continuous-time systems subject to quantization. A hybrid control strategy originating in earlier work (Brockett and Liberzon, IEEE Trans. Automat. Control 45 (2000) 1279) relies on the possibility of making discrete on-line adjustments of quantizer parameters. We explore this method here for general nonlinear systems with general types of quantizers affecting the state of the system, the measured output, or the control input. The analysis involves merging tools from Lyapunov stability, hybrid systems, and input-to-state stability. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.