Heads Of State

"Cheung: President Jiang..."

"Jiang: What I said does not mean I have appointed him by imperial decree to serve the next term. You asked me whether I supported him. I said I do. I've told you clearly.."

"Cheung: Mr. Tung..."

"Jiang: When you asked me that just now, I could've just replied in one sentence: "No comment." But then again, you people still wouldn't be happy. So what should I do?"

"Cheung: But can you..."

"Jiang: No. There's no such implication whatsoever. There's still compliance with Hong Kong's Basic Law, compliance with the election laws..."

"Qian: She asked, in supporting Mr. Tung so early, whether the decision has already been internally to appoint Mr. Tung by imperial decree."

"Jiang: (to Qian Qichen) What did she say?"

"Cheung: President Jiang, even at such an early stage, the party has expressed its support for Mr. Tung. Won't that give people the impression that an internal decision has already been made? That Mr. Tung had been appointed by imperial decree?"

"Jiang: No, you can't just... You people in the media should take note: feeling the wind doesn't mean it's going to rain. When you receive news like this, you also have to make an independent judgment. Do you understand what I'm saying? Suppose these things are totally fabricated, and you repeat what he [Patten] says, equally, you'd also be responsible."

"Cheung: It’s Chris Patten who said that."

"Jiang: Never heard of it."

"Cheung: The European Union recently published a report saying that Beijing will use certain channels to influence and interfere with the rule of law in Hong Kong. What's your response to that?"

"Jiang: Sorry, I don't have any more time to talk to you about this."

"Cheung: Why is this being raised at such an early juncture? Is there no other candidate?"

"Jiang: Of course."

"Reporter: Does the Central Government support him too?"

"Jiang: That’ll be good!"

"Cheung: President Jiang, do you think it’ll be good for Mr. Tung to serve another consecutive term?"

"This experience and the historical experiences gained by the Party since its founding can be summarized as follows: Our Party must always represent the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. These are the inexorable requirements for maintaining and developing socialism, and the logical conclusion our Party has reached through hard exploration and great praxis."

"You are very familiar with western ways, but you are too young. You go everywhere to follow the big news, but the questions you ask are too simple — sometimes naïve. Understand, or not?"

"He was never arrested. I don't know where he is now."

"We want to learn from the west about science and technology and how to manage the economy, but this must be combined with specific conditions here. That's how we have made great progress in the last twenty years."

"The Communist Party of China should represent the development trends of advanced productive forces, the orientations of an advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the ."

"A review of our party's seventy-plus-year history elicits an important conclusion. Our party earned the people's support during the historical periods of revolution, construction and reform because it always represented the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The party also earned popular support because it fought tirelessly to realize the fundamental interests of the country and the people by formulating a correct line, principles and policies. Today, humanity once again stands at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. How our party can better effectuate the Three Represents under the new historical conditions is a major issue all Party comrades, especially high-ranking party cadres, must consider deeply."

"Oil is like drugs. Find the commodity smugglers. Many are adventurous; they will buy from you at a discount and they don't care about embargoes."

"Muammar al-Qaddafi, the dictator of Libya, has experienced roller-coaster relations with the West and with the United States in particular. In 1986, U.S. president Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. fighters to drop 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs on Qaddafi's residence. Qaddafi survived the attack, but 100 other Libyans died that night. In a bizarre twist, supporters of Ronald Reagan would hail the attack as a high point of his presidency, a demonstration of how terrorists should be dealt with, and they would claim the West did not have to worry about Qaddafi after that. Unfortunately, the exact opposite was the truth. Qaddafi increased his support for terrorism, culminating in his involvement in the 1988 destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. In recent years, Qaddafi has made his peace with the West in exchange for access to his large oil reserves. However, it should not be forgotten that domestically Qaddafi still runs a brutal dictatorship in which he maintains complete control over all aspects of Libyan life: "Collective guilt" can lead to the punishment of entire families, tribes, and even towns, and freedom of speech, assembly, and religion are harshly restricted. Libyans can even be arrested for "opposition.""

"It is uncertain … whether Muammar Gaddafi has studied the fate of the man who died on Bosworth Field. But if he died, he might find it instructive. Like Richard, Gaddafi came to power in a palace coup, when he and a group of young officers - the Tripoli equivalents of the Duke of Buckingham et al - overthrew the popular but ailing Idris, Libya's first and only king, in 1969. With a ruthlessness that might have impressed the Duke of Gloucester, Gaddafi had Idris tried in absentia while disinheriting all of his heirs... Just as Richard was challenged by a coalition of the willing assembled around the Lancastrian Earl of Richmond, so have Libyan rebels seeking Gaddafi's overthrow declared their allegiance to the memory of the old king and used his tricolour standard as their symbol of resistance. Gaddafi's well-documented use of assassins, sent abroad to hunt down and murder his enemies during the 1970s and 1980s, and his complicity in the 1988 destruction of Pan Am flight 103, provides a clear echo of Richard's monstrous methodology in commading the killings of the young princes and numerous perceived rivals. Gaddafi's resort to 'human shields'... to protect himself from Nato bombs is no less lethally duplicitous than Richard's treatment of Lady Anne."

"The way things turned out in Misrata was not what Khadafy had hoped for. Right to the very bitter end, he remained a prisoner of his illusions. For four decades, he had heard people, men and women, shouting themselves hoarse with promises of dying for him. For four decades, he had distributed vast sums of money, generated by Libya’s huge oil exports, among a few hundred thousand “Fedaees” or “self-sacrificers,” individuals who were supposed to fight for him to the end. When high on hubris and the “stimulant” drugs he took, the colonel claimed to have “an army of Omar Mukhtars” under his command, named after a bandit who became a local hero by fighting Italian colonialists in 1912. Yet the first city to rise against Khadafy was Tobruk — Omar Mukhtar’s birthplace. Then Benghazi rose, followed by Braiga. As each town and city rose against him, the colonel promised to fight back from another. His last stands were in Bani-Walid and Sirte. Tens of thousands of Omar Mukhtars did enter the battlefield. But they were fighting not for but against him."

"We know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution, Muslim fundamentalist revolution, which is targeted on many of his own Arab compatriots. And where we figure in that, I don't know. Maybe we're just the enemy because—it's a little like climbing Mount Everest—because we're here. But there's no question but that he has singled us out more and more for attack, and we're aware of that. As I say, we're gathering evidence as fast as we can."

"For most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. If he had been an egotist, he wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the West to help the ANC both militarily and financially in the fight against apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon after his release from 27 years in jail, decided to break the UN embargo and travel to Libya on 23 October 1997. Mandela didn’t mince his words when the former US president Bill Clinton said the visit was an ‘unwelcome’ one – ‘No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do’. He added – ‘Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi, they are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past."

"The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.... As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.... From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”"

"Look, I can't take that Mister Gaddafi seriously at all. I can only wish him well in serving his country as I am serving mine, and can only remind him that he shouldn't squeal so loudly."

"Ceauşescu has been fascinated by Gadhafi ever since the latter seized power in Libya in 1969 at the age of 27. Ceauşescu's interest stemmed in part from the fact that he himself had been considered youthful when he came to power in 1965, at the age of 27... Their most important similarity, however, is in their dreams. Gadhafi has gigantic plans to build up Libya as an international power and himself as the undisputed world leader of Islam. Ceauşescu wants to place his country at the center of world politics, to make himself an international figure, and to become the leader of the Third World."

"Aggression has been committed, and the country's leadership, not only Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed. And how was he killed? Well, if they had shot him in a battle, it's one thing, but they humiliated and tormented him, they shot at him, they violated him when he was wounded, they twisted his neck and arms, and then they tortured him to death. It's worse than the Nazis once did. Besides, the United States, Italy, France and Germany have up to $150 billion of Libyan money now. They are very interested to grab this wealth. Everything will be even worse in Libya, because it has colossal deposits of resources, and everyone has rushed there to grab those riches."

"This man did more than all the revolutionaries."

"He died as a hero, Allah will bless him, oil diggers will be punished."

"Succeeding in forcing an entire people on its knees, making it endorse extravagant and irrational concepts, keeping it in ignorance and poverty: this is what this man, who has survived 42 years without ever hesitating to suffocate any attempt at opposition, has achieved. No journalists, no witnesses, he is unapproachable, the arrogant, absolute master. Often, his psychological problems are brought up, but a sophisticated analysis is not needed to pin them down. One need only look at him: his narcissism is pathological, his egocentrism pathetic, and his arrogance terrifying."

"Arrivare a mettere in ginocchio un intero popolo, fargli avallare dei concetti stravaganti e irrazionali, mantenerlo nell'ignoranza e nella povertà: ecco ciò che è riuscito a fare quest'uomo, che ha resistito per 42 anni senza mai esitare di soffocare ogni tentativo di opposizione. Niente giornalisti, niente testimoni, lui non è raggiungibile, è il maestro assoluto e arrogante. Spesso sono stati ricordati i suoi problemi psichologici, ma non occorre una tecnica di analisi sofisticata per coglierli. Basta guardarlo: il suo narcisismo è patologico, il suo egocentrismo è patetico, la sua arroganza è terrificante."

"The actual evidence … is that Qaddafi senior has reached his Ceausescu moment: a full-dress (in the literal sense) meltdown into paranoia, megalomania, and delusion. His recent speeches and appearances have shown him stinking with madness and hysteria. His age and condition, at any rate, set a very sharp limit to the duration of his regime. If that regime implodes while he is still "in place," then all the grim consequences foreseen by the realists will be incurred in any case. Weapons will get into the wrong hands; divide-and-rule tactics (already a stock in trade) will intensify; religious and tribal passions will be deliberately inflamed. The main difference will be that we merely watched this happen"

"The man was a freedom fighter."

"I know something of the good of Moammar Gadhafi that made me to love him as a brother and to feel a great sense of loss at his assassination, He died in honor, fighting for the Libya that he believed in."

"He is intelligent and effectively capable of anything. But I think he has gone too far in this crisis and it is going to be very difficult for him to remain in power."

"Libya is really keen to learn from us... Gaddafi has so many questions. He's particularly anxious to know how we manage our economy, warded off our currency attackers and live harmoniously in a society such as ours. He's a different person now compared to what he was before he's more open, more receptive to ideas on developing his country. He is beginning to understand and accept that peace and harmony are necessary for national development."

"He's stupid. He's clinically stupid... He's the most stupid of all."

"We came, we saw, he died."

"Liberator of Libya, He will be remembered as a great fighter, a revolutionary and martyr."

"Gaddafi was a great leader, a true revolutionary who should not be confused with the new Libyan leadership swept into power by NATO's bayonets and by oil multinationals."

"The way he was martyred on behest of imperialist forces indicates that he was anti-imperialist, brave, courageous and a great revolutionary."

"A man who I have always admired."