Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I do not make stories up, full stop.
I wouldn't say I was part of an anti-war campaign.
Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too?
There is nothing so satisfying as to be shot at without effect.
People turn to violence, because they have no other avenue left.
Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist.
It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers.
Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the "liberating" kind.
Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the 'liberating' kind.
The word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.
In one way, I fear all Damascus is a dungeon. Or do you have to live here to appreciate that?
I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.
And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.
When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.
Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists.
Everyone outside the Roman Empire was called a barbarian. Everyone outside Obama’s empire is called a terrorist.
The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.
Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.
I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.
In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.
It's very easy to start a war but the muftah, as the Arabs say, the key to switch off a war, is very difficult to find.
The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.
William Dalrymple called me a war junkie in his silly book. No, I don't have a desire for it. I'm appalled and infuriated by it.
The Syrian army is tired of corruption. It is tired of party nepotism. It is becoming very angry with those it blames for the war.
And history`s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.
War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.
American power in the Middle East is collapsing. It doesn't need much more than a shove, and it will - and that's not going to be a good thing.
One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to.
I still wonder if the United States realizes how much planning went into this. When we talk about "mindless terrorists," we are lying to ourselves.
Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute - an illusion of course, but that's what Assad thought.
At the end of the day, bin Laden's interest is not Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud.
President Bush will come here and there will be new 'friends' of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who 'liberated' them.
President Bush will come here and there will be new "friends" of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who "liberated" them.
A businessman admits that he 'let go' an employee because he was a Sunni Muslim. You simply have to look after yourself, he explains. I am shocked, like a good Westerner should be.
At Baalbek Nuts I bought pistachios from the Lebanese owners, who answered my request for their thoughts on the war with the typically Lebanese response of no problem. It's a lie, as we all knew.
It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.
Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy.
U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.
Bin Laden was constantly revolving in his mind the fact that he had got rid of the Russians; therefore, the Americans can be got rid of, too. And where better than in the country where he knows how to fight?
In Palestine, the Israelis claim they found a land without people,' a Syrian officer explained to us. 'Now they will take southern Lebanon and claim they have found another land without people if these refugees do not return.
The Americans may think they have 'liberated' Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty - seem to have a different idea what liberation means.
President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a 'world order' dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States? Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden.
And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.
We live in a society in the West, where, when men do violent things, they do them under orders. They are soldiers carrying out orders or mafia men carrying out killings for bosses. But the way things happen in the Middle East is not the same as in the West.
Whatever the political injustices are that created an environment that brought this about, it was not Americans who flew those planes into those buildings. And we should remember that. The crimes against humanity were perpetrated by people who were Arab Muslims.
I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'
I suppose, in the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'
The sheer violence of it, the howl of air raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles carried its own political message; not just to President Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions said last night. This is how we do business.