All Quotes

"We are going through critical times. On the one hand there are the fundamentalists, and on the other the elections and lots of countries with agendas and interests. If we don’t put aside the private interests, and this is difficult to achieve in Lebanon and I know this from my experience as Commander in Chief of the army for nine years and President for nine years, that inside the system you cannot find more than ten honest politicians, though many are outside, but the rest are concerned about individual gains and that cannot make a state. And because it’s critical, I am afraid something will happen."

"That's why I'm saying you must have a quick ceasefire, because the more the Israelis escalate — the things they're doing now, it's not done in the 21st century, when they use smart bombs against civilian buildings, when they use phosphorus bombs and right now they're investigating about it, when they're throwing three tonne bombs on one building — well all this is not allowed. So what I'm saying, you should have a ceasefire as quickly as possible because force will bring force, and there will be a cycle of violence so nobody knows what will happen; it will be really a catastrophe like it is now in Lebanon. That's why I'm saying that we should think about stopping the fire instead of thinking what will happen next. We must stop it and start to talk."

"In Lebanon, Israel cannot have an influence. Believe me, the best thing now is to stop these ideas about under fire to dictate conditions of Israel. It will not work. Now they're using aircrafts again, and they can, use, kill the people they want, they make I mean threats to everybody, that we can get you everywhere, we know, they can get us everywhere, but they cannot get all Lebanon."

"You see, Israel can destroy Lebanon. But it will never have an influence on the people of Lebanon. That's different. As I was saying yesterday, they can hit us, kill us, but we will never kneel, because we've seen what happened when Lebanese knelt in the past, what happened to Lebanon."

"Despite the hail of bombs, the Israelis have been unable to produce one single photo of a destroyed resistance base, because they don't know where they are. Army bases, on the other hand, are well known and this is why they are invariably destroying our armed forces and, above all, civilian targets."

"The Israeli armed forces are destroying Lebanon, and the international community isn't trying to hold them back, but giving them more time to complete their plan of destruction."

"We have today around half a million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, their birth rate is three times higher than the Lebanese. That is a time bomb. It is the basic problem of our country, it led to the outbreak of civil war in 1975 and still remains unsolved today. Everybody today is talking about UN resolution 1559, but nobody mentions resolution 194, which recognizes the Palestinians' right of return (to Israel). Lebanon is small and can't integrate the Palestinians."

"Lebanon respects international laws and acts accordingly and it has never transgressed the rights of others. Lebanon is waiting in return to be treated in the same way and that all its rights, including its waters, are recovered. The fact that Lebanon is securing living requirements for its citizens does not deserve all this brouhaha."

"Lebanon has resisted the Israeli war machine and forced the Israeli occupying forces to back out and withdraw. The threats made by Sharon and others will not prevent Lebanon from holding onto their land and their legitimate rights. As far as the U.S. position is concerned, we are waiting for them to implement what they have been calling for -- supporting human rights and respecting international laws. Based on this, we have extended our hand to everybody, but we will only refer to the authority able to solve such issues -- the United Nations."

"Lebanon may not possess a large military force similar to the U.S. and Israel. Its military arsenal may be modest compared to theirs. However, its solid will, the steadfastness of its people, and its continued cooperation with Syria, as well as coordination with friendly countries are sufficient to achieve what all weapons, however sophisticated and violent may be, cannot achieve. This is not a philosophical theory, but a tangible reality that Lebanon has lived, and that the Palestinian people are living everyday."

"No country can raise itself and continue without building a strong national army. This is a general understanding and a simple condition for establishing a state. I should point out the big role Syria played in helping rebuild the strong Lebanese army. Syria was generous in providing moral and logistic support and remains supportive of the Lebanese army. If not for Syrian support, this country could not have recovered. The help to rebuild the army is one of many steps adopted by the Syrian command in support of Lebanon. Reality proves that Syria always stood by Lebanon, especially when it faced problems and difficult days in its efforts to liberate its land from Israeli occupation that lasted more than 25 years."

""There is no doubt that the primary targets of the latest Israeli war in Lebanon was also to destroy the awakening and prosperity of our country. The Israelis themselves said that they want to take Lebanon 20 years back. Lebanon is Israel's chief rival in the field of finance, culture and tourism. And that is why we can see that whenever Lebanon bounces back and begins to make progress, Israel attacks it."

"So boys and girls, if you grow up and claim the right to live together and govern yourselves — and you ought to — and if you do not concede the same right to other peoples — and you will be strong enough to have your own way — you will be tyrants, won't you? If you do not like that word, use a better one, if you find one, but don't deceive yourselves by the words you use."

"We should not forget that in a world without boundaries, where a digital reality have changed the rules of the game due to the technological advances of our age, resources cannot be seen as of the realm of wealthy countries, as its problems cannot be seen as distinct from those of developing countries. The problems of illegal immigration which Lebanon suffers from and is hence joining the fight against- and what Europe currently faces in currents against this immigration, are evidence of the urgency with which we should tackle the root causes of such a problem."

"Our States, which are trying through this convention to strengthen their cooperation and economic ties, in order to create further chances for their development, and getting out of the circle of negative consumerism, are hence stronger and more able to correct the economic and political imbalances. For the resources of our countries, be they human, industrial, commercial, productive, are manifold and voluminous. And these resources need modern and global plans in order to be implemented, and changed into development and modernity."

"The aim of our mutual economic cooperation is to break the economic and commercial isolation and correct the imbalance in world economies, in order to prevent the problems of poverty and dependence of becoming worldwide crises, feeding the gene pools of fanaticism, isolationism and terrorism."

"Recent days have brought a notably offensive example. In the face of intense opposition across the Lebanese political and religious spectrum, Syria pressured the country's cabinet last weekend into endorsing a constitutional change designed to let President Émile Lahoud extend his expiring six-year term for three more years. Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has for years been a fierce foe of Mr. Lahoud and had strongly opposed amending the Constitution. But he suddenly changed his mind after a Friday night meeting with the Syrian chief of military intelligence. Now, barring a brave last-minute revolt by Lebanon's parliament, Syria will get its way and Mr. Lahoud, who long ago lost his support among the Lebanese but remains a willing tool of Damascus, will stay on. It is not easy for any Lebanese politician to stand up to the ruthless Syrian dictatorship and the 20,000 troops it keeps on hand to enforce its will. This is the third time in a decade that Syria has forced Lebanon to change its Constitution to ensure that there is a pro-Syrian president."

"I don’t feel the need to label my sexuality. I feel like labels are created because people want to get a grasp of something that they can’t understand."

"My skin is not red but that is what my people are called by others. My skin is brown, light brown, but our cheeks have a little flush and that is why we are called red skins. We don’t mind that. There is no difference between us, under the skins, that any expert with a carving knife has ever discovered."

"You would call it Canada. We do not. We call the little ten-miles square we have left the "Grand River Country." We have the right to do that. It is ours. We have the written pledge of George III that we should have it forever as against him or his successors and he promised to protect us in it."

"You got half of your territory here by warfare upon redmen, usually unprovoked, and you got about a quarter of it by bribing their chiefs, and not over a quarter of it did you get openly and fairly. You might have gotten a good share of it by fair means if you had tried."

"You young people in the United States may not believe what I am saying. Do not take my word, but read your history. A good deal of true history about that has got into print now."

"The governments at Washington and Ottawa have a silent partnership of policy. It is aimed to break up every tribe of Redmen so as to dominate every acre of their territory. Your high officials are the nomads today — Not the Red People. Your officials won't stay home. Over in Ottawa, they call that policy "Indian Advancement". Over in Washington, they call it "Assimilation." We who would be the helpless victims say it is tyranny."

"If this must go on to the bitter end, we would rather that you come with your guns and poison gases and get rid of us that way. Do it openly and above board. Do away with the pretense that you have the right to subjugate us to your will."

"We want none of your laws and customs that we have not willingly adopted for ourselves. We have adopted many. You have adopted some of ours — votes for women, for instance."

"We appealed to Ottawa in the name of our right as a separate people and by right of our treaties, and the door was closed in our faces. We then went to London with our treaty and asked for the protection it promised and got no attention. Then we went to the at Geneva with its covenant to protect little peoples and to enforce respect for treaties by its members and we spent a whole year patiently waiting but got no hearing."

"Ottawa officials, under pretense of a friendly visit, asked to inspect our precious belts, made by our Fathers centuries ago as records of our history, and when shown to them, these false-faced officials seized and carried away those belts as bandits take away your precious belongings. [...] The Ottawa government thought that with no wampum belts to read in the opening of our Six Nations Councils, we would give up our home rule and self-government, the victims of superstition. Any superstition of which the Grand River people have been victims are not in reverence for wampum belts, but in their trust in the honor of governments who boast of a higher civilization."

"If you are bound to treat us as though we were citizens under your government, then those of your people who are land-hungry will get our farms away from us by hooks and crooks under your property laws in your courts that we do not understand and do not wish to learn. We would then be homeless and have to drift into your big cities to work for wages, to buy bread, and have to pay rent, as you call it, to live on this earth and to live in little rooms in which we would suffocate. We would then be scattered and lost to each other and lost among so many of you."

"It seems that the American tendency to choose from a cafeteria-style theological menu is not limited to Catholics."

"This story comes straight from Deskaheh, one of the Chiefs of the . I am the speaker of the , the oldest League of Nations now existing. It was founded by . It is a League which is still alive and intends, as best it can, to defend the rights of the Iroquois to live under their own laws in their own little countries now left to them, to worship their Great Spirit in their own way, and to enjoy the rights which are as surely theirs as the white man's rights are his own."

"Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away."

"I never really had any aspirations to be an actor when I was young. I wanted to play the piano in a bar, to be the old dude with a whisky glass, all dishevelled."

"If I do decide one day to stop acting, I just hate the idea of people going: 'Oh, did you ever do anything else besides that Twilight thing?'"

"I don't really know how to act, I kind of wanted to somehow make it real, and one of the ways I've always thought makes that a little bit easier is if you shake up your physical state just before action. You end up walking into a scene having a different feeling."

"Hindi porket ginagawa [mo ang pagtakbo], hindi ibig sabihing wala nang career. Ako, nagsasalita ako para sa sarili ko. Ang pag-serve ay galing sa puso. Basta kapag ang artista bago pasukin ang pulitika, isipin din. (Just because you’re popular and well-known, you’ll run. That can’t be. Plant those seeds first. You can’t enter politics instantly. At the same time, it doesn’t mean that celebrities enter politics because they don’t have any careers. I’m speaking for myself here. Serving should come from the heart. Once a celebrity decides to enter politics, I hope they ponder it first.)"

"Let Man remember that he is the Master, but not a Tyrant."

"It is difficult to suppress the fear that the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to functional democracy. During the past four decades, America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation’s heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics. Indeed, popular anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism are now synonymous."

"One of the most remarkable characteristics of America’s revolutionary generation was the presence and influence of so many genuine intellectuals (although the term had not been coined in the eighteenth century). Men of extraordinary learning and intellect were disproportionately represented among the politicians who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and led the republic during its formative decades."

"The denigration of fairness has affected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which a disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another."

"Americans are alone in the developed world in their view of evolution by means of natural selection as “controversial” rather than as settled mainstream science."

"This level of scientific illiteracy provides fertile soil for political appeals based on sheer ignorance."

"The current American relationship to reading and writing by contrast, is best described not as illiterate but as a-literate.…In this increasingly a-literate America, not only the enjoyment of reading but critical thinking itself is at risk."

"The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between."

"One important element of the resurgent anti-intellectualism in American life is the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values. The entire concept is summed up by the right-wing rubric “the elites.”"

"The unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent, represents a departure from the best side of American popular and elite intellectual traditions."

"In today’s America, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. This obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism."

"They ain’t been here long ’nough. They just barely human. Maybe not even. They suck up the world, don’t taste it."

"The intimacy of her mother’s hands and the warmth of the water lulled the Girl into a trance of sensuality she never forgot. Now the blood washing slowly down her breastbone and soaking into the floor below was like that bath—a cleansing."

"All these hundreds of years, from the days of the oldest poetry collections, there have been poems about cherry blossoms. The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention."

"Every worm to his taste; Some prefer to eat nettles."