Top 100 Elliott Abrams Quotes
#1. If you said to people you can cast a secret ballot on whether to turn back the clock and have Morsi in power again, I don't think very many people in Washington would turn back that clock.
Elliott Abrams
#2. The best-armed and best-trained divisions of the Syrian army are Alawite.
Elliott Abrams
#3. Grasping the realities of the Middle East is never easy. This is not primarily because they change quickly, but because so much time, effort, and money is spent to prevent reality from breaking through.
Elliott Abrams
#4. From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews.
Elliott Abrams
#6. Henry M. Jackson, congressman and senator from 1941 until his death in 1983, achieved far greater renown than most legislators, ran for president in 1972 and 1976, and was for much of the 1970s and 1980s one of the most powerful men in America.
Elliott Abrams
#7. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror.
Elliott Abrams
#12. I want to be the first guy to reverse a communist revolution.
Elliott Abrams
#13. The conflict between secular Zionism and the settler movement did not appear overnight following Israel's conquests in the 1967 war, for there was an argument that bridged the gap: security.
Elliott Abrams
#14. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, its influence and that of Hamas and Hezbollah are strengthened.
Elliott Abrams
#15. The Iranians don't want the same thing we do in Iraq, not really; they want to control Iraq ... the Ayatollah hates the United States; the Iranians are enemies of the United States.
Elliott Abrams
#16. The early reviews of Dick Cheney's memoir have not evaluated the book, but instead have used its publication as an occasion for attacks on Cheney and his record, with general assaults on George W. Bush's administration thrown in for good measure.
Elliott Abrams
#17. I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.
Elliott Abrams
#18. While all Alawites fear vengeance against their entire community should Assad fall, there are varying degrees of loyalty to the Assads.
Elliott Abrams
#19. On taking office in 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama put Israeli settlements at the center of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Elliott Abrams
#20. It's not good for Israel to govern millions of Palestinians.
Elliott Abrams
#21. There is no softer target in GOP primaries than the United Nations and foreign-aid spending.
Elliott Abrams
#22. The accession to power in Pyongyang of Kim Jong Un, son of Kim Jong Il and grandson of Kim Il Sung, is a unique achievement in world politics.
Elliott Abrams
#23. I well remember a leading Egyptian liberal saying to me in 2003 that she did not favor free elections right then in Egypt; she favored them in a decade's time if she and others had those 10 years to organize freely.
Elliott Abrams
#24. The Erdogan government's first major step outside of the U.S. alliance was during the Bush Administration, when it wouldn't let Washington use Turkey as a launching ground for U.S. troops entering Iraq in 2003.
Elliott Abrams
#26. The Arab monarchies, especially Jordan and Morocco, are more legitimate than the false republics, with their stolen elections, regime-dominated courts and rubber-stamp parliaments.
Elliott Abrams
#27. George McGovern and his supporters committed what, in a two-party system, are capital crimes: they did not compromise, they took hard ideological positions, they alienated a large portion of their party's traditional supporters, and they lost - very, very badly.
Elliott Abrams
#28. When you work in the White House you talk to the White House staff all day, so you're talking to the guy who handles the congressional liaison and the guy who's handling domestic politics and the guy who's handling the American economy and so forth.
Elliott Abrams
#29. President Bush was disgusted by the Assad regime's oppression of the Syrian people as well as its support for terrorism, interference in Lebanon, and encouragement of jihadist attacks on Americans in Iraq.
Elliott Abrams
#30. One good way of measuring the mood in Israel is just how alert or relaxed the guards at every restaurant entrance appear to be.
Elliott Abrams
#31. In Kuwait there is already a real, elected parliament with genuine power, but the prime minister is always a member of the ruling al-Sabah family. That must end.
Elliott Abrams
#32. President Bush met repeatedly with human rights activists and freedom fighters from all over the world to give them encouragement and protection and to advance their cause.
Elliott Abrams
#33. Is multilateralism nothing more than a dodge for simple inaction?
Elliott Abrams
#34. In the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo is the daughter of Diosdado Macapagal - but his term ended in 1965, and she was elected in 2001. Hardly a hand-off.
Elliott Abrams
#35. Tunisia was not for the United States an important country in the way, let's say, Algeria was because of its gas, because of its size, because of its struggle against terrorism that sometimes turned bloody.
Elliott Abrams
#36. Every Israeli government since 1967, of left or right, has asserted that Jerusalem is Israel's capital and has allowed Israeli Jews to build there.
Elliott Abrams
#37. While we use American power to fight hard for democracy against extremism on both left and right, our critics seem suspicious of any assertion of United States power or influence against any government or group that claims to be on the left.
Elliott Abrams
#38. Legislation for the Caribbean basin has led to more jobs in the Dominican Republic.
Elliott Abrams
#39. I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats - kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.
Elliott Abrams
#40. The United States should help strengthen nongovernmental humanitarian agencies working in Sudan so that they can handle an increased flow of aid.
Elliott Abrams
#41. Honduras was the original 'banana republic,' and its poverty remains extreme.
Elliott Abrams
#42. The Obama administration has vastly expanded the use of armed drones and concentrated a great deal of diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then strike against them.
Elliott Abrams
#43. When a deeply sympathetic American president asks for concessions and compromises and appears able to cajole some from the Palestinians, which was the Clinton/Rabin and Bush/Sharon combination, Israel must respond.
Elliott Abrams
#44. Tunisia is small - just ten million, no great natural resources.
Elliott Abrams
#45. For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.
Elliott Abrams
#46. The way for the Palestinians to get a state is to go ahead and build it.
Elliott Abrams
#47. The United States needs to be far clearer: we cannot and will not support any government where Hamas has a real influence and the security forces stop fighting terror.
Elliott Abrams
#48. Scandinavia is boring. People living there apparently have little to do. And as European history teaches, when there is nothing much to do, you may as well amuse yourself by attacking the Jews.
Elliott Abrams
#49. The Right is simply more pro-Israel than the Left.
Elliott Abrams
#50. The good Jew is ritually observant and resists assimilation, in some sense living apart, never fitting comfortably into American or any other society.
Elliott Abrams
#51. Mass killing has very clearly not been eliminated, nor has the 'international community' developed a response that will avert it or bring it to a quick end.
Elliott Abrams
#52. The United States and its Gulf allies, some of who are actively funding rebel groups in Syria, should undertake a serious joint review of Jordan's needs and then act together to meet them.
Elliott Abrams
#53. Can Israelis be wistful? It is not the characteristic we usually associate with them; more typically they are said to be tough, sweet, angry, thoughtful, demanding - not wistful.
Elliott Abrams
#54. After 9/11, we did see Palestinian terrorism in the context of all terrorism.
Elliott Abrams
#55. Elections matter, but how much they matter depends entirely on how free, open and fair they are.
Elliott Abrams
#56. The truce brokered by Egypt between Israel and Hamas depends, above all, on the borders between Egypt, Gaza and Israel.
Elliott Abrams
#57. Never fight turf on turf. Fight it on the basis of ideas.
Elliott Abrams
#58. Egypt needs law and order in Sinai to save the tourist industry in Sharm el-Sheik and prevent the area from becoming a base for terrorists that will target Egypt itself, as well as Jordan and Israel.
Elliott Abrams
#59. Olmert made a proposal on the governing of Jerusalem that I do not believe his cabinet or the Knesset would have accepted.
Elliott Abrams
#60. The story of the Jews in the Bible is replete with incidents of their ingratitude to God for His gifts to them: incidents that just as repeatedly merit and receive punishment.
Elliott Abrams
#61. In most cases, cables are marked secret not because the U.S. requires it but because those speaking to us - the foreign leaders across the table - do. They are not keeping secrets from us, but from two other groups: their enemies and their subjects.
Elliott Abrams
#62. Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.
Elliott Abrams
#63. America was not founded to improve health care or housing; it was founded for freedom.
Elliott Abrams
#65. Even today, when the Obama administration has liberalized travel to Cuba - and failed to reverse that liberalization when Alan Gross was imprisoned - there are limits.
Elliott Abrams
#66. The Fayyad cabinet may well be the best the Palestinians ever get. But whatever its good qualities, there is no democracy.
Elliott Abrams
#67. The courage of the Syrian protesters is remarkable, for they face prison, torture, or death every time they lift a banner.
Elliott Abrams
#68. In Arab capitals, the failure of the United States to stop Iran's nuclear program is understood as American weakness in the struggle for dominance in the Middle East, making additional cooperation from Arab leaders on Israeli-Palestinian issues even less likely.
Elliott Abrams
#69. The United States treated Gaddafi as an enemy due to his support for terrorism against us, until a rapprochement of sorts began under Pres. George W. Bush at the very end of 2003.
Elliott Abrams
#70. At the United Nations, a lynch mob for Israel is always just a moment away.
Elliott Abrams
#71. On the human rights side, administration policy has been marked by indifference. When the people of Iran flooded the streets to protest the theft of their presidential election in June 2009, President Obama was silent for 11 days.
Elliott Abrams
#72. The Sandinistas are a tough bunch of guys, with a fabulous amount of Soviet Bloc equipment and Soviet Bloc advisers.
Elliott Abrams
#73. Huge numbers of embassy cables are labeled 'unclassified' or 'limited official use' and deal with mundane matters.
Elliott Abrams
#74. Needless to say, if the Arab-Israeli conflict is about interstate disputes and the need to resolve the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it can be solved; if it is a religious conflict, nothing but violence is ahead.
Elliott Abrams
#75. The notion that public service requires men and women of good character now seems quaint.
Elliott Abrams
#76. In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected.
Elliott Abrams
#77. If you say to the White House, 'Obama has been very unfriendly to Israel,' they say, 'What do you mean? It's the best military-to-military relationship ever.' And that part is true.
Elliott Abrams
#78. Every Arab 'republic' has been a republic of fear, but only Saddam Hussein's Iraq surpassed the Assads' Syria in number of victims.
Elliott Abrams
#79. Arab states continue to send the Palestinians gifts of extravagant rhetoric and countless Arab League resolutions - but not much cash.
Elliott Abrams
#80. The Knesset is in Israel, and the Western Wall is in Israel, and the sooner the Obama administration realizes this, the closer it will be to a Middle East policy worthy of our country and its long alliance with our ally in Jerusalem - which is, actually, the capital of the state of Israel.
Elliott Abrams
#81. Evangelicals too often fall short in their actual teachings about Judaism.
Elliott Abrams
#82. A great nation like the United States has many and varied interests, and we need both to do business with tyrants and to engage constantly in multilateral diplomacy.
Elliott Abrams
#83. Gadhafi's vicious regime has left Libya far worse than he found it on the day of his coup in 1969.
Elliott Abrams
#84. The ransoming of captives has been practiced by Jews for many centuries and has been regarded as a greater obligation than charity for the poor.
Elliott Abrams
#85. There's always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story.
Elliott Abrams
#86. Dubai must crack down on rampant smuggling, and the U.A.E. federal government has significantly stepped up pressure.
Elliott Abrams
#87. The anchors of the Arab consensus have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and both are now weakened forces in Arab politics and diplomacy.
Elliott Abrams
#88. We need to understand that an open society and free speech and press ... really are the best weapons against al Qaeda and extremism.
Elliott Abrams
#89. U.S.-Israel relations are often depicted as an extended honeymoon, but that's a false image.
Elliott Abrams
#90. History may someday record that the Arab awakening that began with the Arab revolt of 1916 against the Ottomans ended about a century later with a whimper.
Elliott Abrams
#91. It is a natural goal of Iran to try and expel the Fifth Fleet from Bahrain.
Elliott Abrams
#92. The U.S. has the power to block all anti-Israel moves in the Security Council, not just some of them, and to do so without agreeing to unfair, damaging compromises.
Elliott Abrams
#94. In Jordan, where the prime minister is always a commoner, the king has announced some new reforms that would tend to move the country toward a more democratic system: Notably, the prime minister would emerge from the victorious political party, not from back room conversations in the royal palace.
Elliott Abrams
#95. I just don't understand how Kerry or Obama or anybody else thought Assad was going to change.
Elliott Abrams
#96. The intersection of religion and world politics has often been a bloody crossroads.
Elliott Abrams
#97. Times change. Cable news and the Internet alone have transformed the way outreach to the American people can be accomplished.
Elliott Abrams
#98. Refusing to lift sanctions and adopting tougher rhetoric toward Iran would not be partisan issues. Plenty of Democrats think that those actions are both good politics and good policy.
Elliott Abrams
#99. Denmark has long been regarded as one of the world's most attractive nations, for citizens and tourists alike. My own visits there, years ago as a student, were delightful.
Elliott Abrams
#100. I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.
Elliott Abrams
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