Columbia University Alumni

"I do not recognise the Prosecutor’s Office and the Georgian judiciary, I am not here to be part of a pre-written comedy (before adress)"

"Standing at David's tomb, we must say Georgia will unite, Georgia will become strong and will restore its integrity... I want all of us to do it together and I promise not to become a source of shame for you."

"Our steady course is towards European integration. It is time Europe finally saw and valued Georgia and took steps towards us."

"[W]hen the people of Georgia rose up to defend their freedom - they also rose up to reclaim their future. A future that would no longer be defined by the false promises, wholesale decay, and state disintegration of the recent past. A future no longer dominated by the politics of division, state-sanctioned theft and disregard for the poorest parts of society."

"Georgia is the country of unique culture. We are not only old Europeans, we are the very first Europeans, and therefore Georgia holds special place in European civilization. Georgia should serve as a paragon for democracy where all citizens are equal before the law, where every citizen will have an equal opportunity for the pursuit of success and realization of his or her possibilities. Georgia should become and will become a homeland for independent, educated and proud people."

"It is time we Georgians did not depend only on others, it is time we asked what Georgia will do for the world."

"Georgia's character - now and forever - celebrates tolerance, embraces diversity, relishes lively and open debate, and above all, respects liberty and human dignity. Georgia is a democracy, because above all - its national identity is rooted in the traditions of democracy."

"I am Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgia did not have a criminal president [talks about himself]. I want every Georgian to know this. The founder of the Georgian state could not have been a criminal, because criminals do not establish states, they instead destroy them and you are [now] witnessing a classic example of that, as Georgia has fallen into the hands of bandits."

"If the West is outdated, then why do millions of Poles, Czech, Estonians, Romanians, and others cherish so much the day they entered NATO? And why are millions of Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans, and others desperately knocking on the doors of the European Union? If freedom is no longer fashionable, how do we explain that the suicide of an unknown citizen in a remote Tunisian town has changed the map of the world?"

"Putin told several Western leaders, “I want Saakashvili’s head.” If they want my head, for me it’s more funny than troubling."

"Look, the rift with Russia is not connected to Georgia. It is connected to values. Russia has become very authoritarian. It doesn’t accept free speech or real elections anymore."

"First and foremost - our vision for a united and peaceful Georgia is based on respect for the desire - and respect for the right - to South Ossetian autonomy."

"Georgia does not need Russia as an enemy."

"For the first time in 15 years, Georgia this winter has its electric power guaranteed without deficit. This is a historic achievement."

"A united Georgia needs our unity now, to work together towards our many common goals."

"We must create the Georgia that our ancestors dreamed of, the Georgia that we dream of."

"I think Beto O'Rourke is overrated. When I heard about him I thought he must be something special; he's not. I think he got beaten badly in the debates. I think he is a highly overrated guy."

"Beto voted against his own party to pass GOP bills for business tax cuts, Wall St dereg, Trump’s deportation force, and chipping away at the ACA. It’s your right to argue thats totally OK — but let’s not use vague averages to obscure what his specific votes were about."

"He’s not making money the way most politicians are, and I think that really scares a lot of them because politicians are so used to that system, and they’re so used to scratching each other’s backs that we all suffer from that in the end and he’s you know, he’s like, "No I’m not going to do that." And that is just so inspiring."

"Let us be clear: This isn’t a matter of policy differences. This man is a boob, a dolt. He is vulgar and ungrammatical, knows nothing, and makes no sense. He can’t keep his mouth shut for five seconds and he is wired like an early helicopter with a vertical rotor on its tail: he can’t gabble out his nonsense without waving his arms around. He knows everything, meaning nothing, is incapable of making a correct factual statement, and throws in the f-word for emphasis, even where there is nothing to emphasize. Yet he is performing a valuable role: This is the candidate the media have been looking for."

"He’s dishonest. That’s why the president called him "Lyin’ Ted," and that’s why the nickname stuck. Because it’s true."

"No necesitamos el muro. Si queremos asegurar nuestras comunidades, necesitamos tratar gente con respeto y dignidad. El ejemplo es el ciudad de El Paso donde nací, donde crecí, donde están mis hijos en las mismas escuelas donde yo estaba. Somos una de las comunidades más seguras de los Estados Unidos ahora, y no necesitamos un muro. No necesitamos la Guardia Nacional. Necesitamos reflejar la fortaleza de nuestras comunidades, incluyendo los inmigrantes."

"All of you, showing the country how you do this. I'm so fucking proud of you guys."

"All of the Democratic candidates and the entire political process are being taken over and occupied by the invasion of the whole public space by Robert Francis O’Rourke. No one has ever heard or seen anything like this candidate: a hyperactive limb-flailing imbecile, babbling compulsively in a torrent of extremist nonsense barely couched in comprehensible syntax."

"We always called him Beto!"

"Everyone should deserve that next chance to improve their lives, to contribute to their communities, to do better, and if my own personal experience serves as some form of motivation… then there will be some good that has come out of it."

"Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We're not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore."

"Former Congressmember O'Rourke voted for 20 out of 29 military spending bills (69%) since 2013...Peace Action... [noted his] votes opposing specific cuts in the military budget... he voted for an 11th aircraft-carrier in 2015, and against an overall 1% cut in the military budget in 2016. He voted against reducing the number of U.S. troops in Europe in 2013 and he twice voted against placing limits on a Navy slush fund. O'Rourke was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and he took in $111,210 from the "defense" industry for his Senate campaign, more than any other Democratic presidential candidate. Despite an obvious affinity with military-industrial interests, of which there are many throughout Texas, O'Rourke has not highlighted foreign or military policy in his Senate or presidential campaigns, suggesting that this is something he would like to downplay. In Congress, he was a member of the corporate New Democrat Coalition that progressives see as a tool of plutocratic and corporate interests."

"Beto O'Rourke deserves a lot of gratitude for inspiring and activating Democrats across the state. He has now twice planted the seeds of future victory."

"Something I didn’t know: Beto O'Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress."

"For weeks, Beto fans have attacked our reporting in an effort to intimidate journalists into not looking into his record. But now the Houston Chronicle is citing our reporting for having prompted a much needed debate about climate policy & his record."

"Well-informed public discussion is a major hazard for Democratic Party elites now eager to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2020 presidential nomination. In recent weeks, Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke has become a lightning rod in a gathering political storm— largely because of the vast hype about him from mass media and Democratic power brokers. At such times, when spin goes into overdrive, we need incisive factual information."

"Punk rock, at its best, was just stripping down all the corporate rock I was hearing on the radio in the 1980s and getting down to its most basic roots."

"He absolutely loved life and loved people and his family and gave it everything that he could. He was always so focused on doing what he thought was important or the right thing, and there was a joy that came out of that. I wish I could find my own and I seek to do that."

"I absolutely have made mistakes, and some of them are very grave. I think people are owed that story and should make a decision based on the complete story."

"Ted Cruz doesn’t have an office anywhere near El Paso. John Cornyn doesn’t have an office anywhere near El Paso. Presidential candidates don’t come to El Paso. Gubernatorial candidates don’t come to El Paso. People who are focused on power don’t come to El Paso. And I was saying that in front of the crowd in Tex­arkana, and this lady in front of the crowd said, "That’s how I feel!" That’s how a lot of Texas feels—they feel forgotten, left behind, unrepresented, unimportant to the centers of power and the system as it currently works. It doesn’t work for them. A lot of the state feels like El Paso feels, and a lot of the state wants their state back and wants to be recognized and represented and served. I think this campaign is all about that."

"[Chivers] writes both with technical precision and the humanity that comes with understanding the invariably unhappy and all too often horrific consequences of the weapon’s effects. All this makes for a delicate and at times fascinating balancing act, as Mr. Chivers the enthusiast and expert shares the page with Mr. Chivers the historian and journalist — the expert dealing well with the detailed mechanics of his subject, the journalist at other times brilliantly illuminating the book with highly effective vignettes of human courage, ingenuity and, mostly, suffering...Sometimes, however, he dwells, perhaps indulgently, on a particular theme or episode. We are for example more than a third of the way through before we encounter the sometimes pathetic, sometimes tragic figure of Mikhail Kalashnikov and his eponymous rifle. Mr. Chivers’s account of the general development of automatic weapons and the men who pioneered them is impressive."

"A graduate of Cornell University and the Columbia School of Journalism, Chivers is often referred to as the best war correspondent of his generation. The 2017 prize for feature writing is the second Pulitzer for Chivers; he won in 2009 as part of a team of NY Times reporters honored for their dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is also the author of "The Gun," a historical work."

"This is a fascinating story, and Chivers, a New York Times writer, tells it very well. He exploits his firearms expertise and combat experience as a Marine officer and later war correspondent to explain how the arcane science of ballistics and weapons design has impacted on the battlefields of the world. My only regret about his work is that he has superimposed upon the history of the contest between the AK-47 and M-16 a wider examination of the history of machine guns, which seems an unnecessary diversion...Chivers has written the best book so far about what is probably the most influential weapons system of our times."

"He is justly lauded as one of the finest war correspondents of his generation..."

"Many factors determine the severity of a wound, including a bullet’s mass, velocity and composition, and where it strikes. The AR-15, like the M4 and M16 rifles issued to American soldiers, shoots lightweight, high-speed bullets that can cause grievous bone and soft tissue wounds, in part by turning sideways, or “yawing,” when they hit a person. Surgeons say the weapons produce the same sort of horrific injuries seen on battlefields. Civilian owners of military-style weapons can also buy soft-nosed or hollow-point ammunition, often used for hunting, that lacks a full metal jacket and can expand and fragment on impact. Such bullets, which can cause wider wound channels, are proscribed in most military use."

"We know this because of the work of C. J. Chivers of The New York Times, also a frequent contributor to Esquire, whose expertise in ballistics and battlefield tactics—and nearly unprecedented experience reporting from war zones—has made him the most important war correspondent of his time...A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other things, its study of the weapons we use to kill one another. After reporting on a firefight—whether he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia, Libya, or Syria—he'd look for shell casings and ordnance fragments. If he was embedded with American soldiers or Marines, he'd ask them if he could look through what they had found for an hour or so—"finger fucking," he'd call it—and ask his photographer to take pictures of ammunition stamps and serial numbers. Over time and in this way he would reveal a vast world of small-arms trade and secret trafficking that no other journalist had known existed before."

"...aimed semiautomatic fire from a competent shooter can be far more dangerous than automatic fire, which is harder to control and is often inaccurate."

"A half-century later, AR-15s and M-16s are made in varied forms by multiple manufacturers, and updated versions, including the M-4 carbine, remain the standard shoulder-fired weapon for most American service members and many allies. Civilian versions have many trade and model names, but are generally referred to as AR-15s, although this name is a rough description and does not indicate whether a particular specimen of the rifle is capable of both semiautomatic fire and automatic fire, or is semiautomatic only."

"The main functional difference between the military’s M16 and M4 rifles and a civilian AR-15 is the “burst” mode on many military models, which allow three rounds to be fired with one trigger pull. Some military versions of the rifles have a full automatic feature, which fires until the trigger is released or a magazine is empty of ammunition. But in actual American combat these technical differences are less significant than they seem. For decades the American military has trained its conventional troops to fire their M4s and M16s in the semiautomatic mode — one bullet per trigger pull — instead of on “burst” or automatic in almost all shooting situations. The weapons are more accurate this way, and thus more lethal. The National Rifle Association and other pro-gun groups highlight the fully automatic feature in military M4s and M16s. But the American military, after a long experience with fully automatic M16s reaching back to Vietnam, decided by the 1980s to issue M16s, and later M4s, to most conventional troops without the fully automatic function, and to train them to fire in a more controlled fashion. What all of this means is that the Parkland gunman, in practical terms, had the same rifle firepower as an American grunt using a standard infantry rifle in the standard way... A New York Times analysis of a video from a Florida classroom estimates that during his crime the gunman fired his AR-15 as quickly as one-and-a-half rounds per second. The military trains soldiers to fire at a sustained rate of 12 to 15 rounds per minute, or a round every four or five seconds."

"As Ismay finished his service commitment with the Navy in 2010, he read a New York Times piece detailing the complex origins of weapons found inside a Taliban gun locker. He then began corresponding with C. J. Chivers, the paper’s longtime conflict and arms reporter who wrote the piece. Ismay calls him Chris, but for seven years ending in 1994, he was Captain Chivers, a Marine infantry officer who served in the Gulf War."

"Classified reports from Vietnam were giving the AR-15 high marks and providing a surprise. Reports from the field claimed that when a bullet fired from the AR-15 struck a man, it inflicted devastating injuries. The causes were apparently twofold. First, the metal jacket of early AR-15 bullets tended to shatter on impact, sending fragmentation slicing through victims. (In the army, this was variously seen as attractive and worrisome. In classified correspondence, some officers were thrilled by the perceived wounding characteristics, which one prominent army doctor described as "explosive effects." Others wondered whether the .223 round might be illegal under international convention.) Second, the bullets often turned sideways inside a victim, a phenomenon known as yaw. In one respect, the effects of yaw somewhat resemble what could be seen on the surface of a lake when a speedboat turned sharply. In this case, the energy delivery manifested itself as a shock wave within a human body, which could create stretching or rupturing injury to tissue not directly in a bullet's path. By turning, the bullet also crushed and cut more tissue as it passed through a victim, creating a larger wound channel."

"ArmaLite was an infant and an upstart, a company that began as a workshop in the Hollywood garage of George Sullivan, the patent counsel for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Sullivan was an engineer fascinated with the possibilities of applying new materials to change the way rifles looked and felt. In 1953, he met Paul Cleaveland, secretary of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, at an industry luncheon. The pair talked about lightweight firearms and new ways to manufacture them. Cleaveland mentioned the conversation to Richard Boutelle, Fairchild's president, who was a gun buff, too. Boutelle and Sullivan agreed to collaborate, and ArmaLite was founded in 1954 as a tiny Fairchild division. It hired a former Marine, Eugene Stoner, as a designer. One of the early creations was the AR-15, made at the informal request of an Army general who wanted a prototype rifle that would fire a small, high-speed round. The AR-15 looked like nothing else in military service. It had an aluminum receiver, plastic furniture, and an odd-looking carrying handle. It was thirty-nine inches long. It weighed, when unloaded, roughly 6.5 pounds, about half the weight of an automatic M14. Its appearance — small, dark, lean, and synthetically futuristic — stirred emotions. To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw an ugly toy. Wherever one stood, no one denied the ballistics were intriguing. Stoner had designed a narrow but powerful new cartridge, the .223, for his weapon. The cartridge's propellant and the AR-15's twenty-inch barrel worked together to move a tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds — in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound."

"I feel that the recent ruling of the United States Army and Navy regarding the refusal of colored blood donors is an indefensible one from any point of view. As you know, there is no scientific basis for the separation of the bloods of different races except on the basis of the individual blood types or groups.(1942)"

"The death of Black Jade coincided with the wedding hour of Pao-yu and Precious Virtue. Shortly after Snow Duck was taken to the wedding chambers, Black Jade had regained consciousness. During this lucid moment, which was not unlike the afterglow of the setting sun, she took Purple Cuckoo's hand and said to her with an effort, "My hour is here. You have served me for many years, and I had hoped that we should be together the rest of our lives... but I am afraid..." The effort exhausted her and she fell back, panting. She still held Purple Cuckoo's hand and continued after a while, "Mei-mei, I have only one wish. I have no attachment here. After my death, tell them to send my body back to the south––" She stopped again, and her eyes closed slowly. Purple Cuckoo felt her mistress' hand tighten over hers. Knowing this was a sign of the approaching end, she sent for Li Huan, who had gone back to her own apartment for a brief rest. When the latter returned with Quest Spring, Black Jade's hands were already cold and her eyes dull. They suppressed their sobs and hastened to dress her. Suddenly Black Jade cried, "Pao-yu, Pao-yu, how––" Those were her last words. Above their own lamentations, Li Huan, Purple Cuckoo, and Quest Spring thought they heard the soft notes of an ethereal music in the sky. They went out to see what it was, but all they could hear was the rustling of the wind through the bamboos and all they could see was the shadow of the moon creeping down the western wall."