Top 57 Robert Fisk Quotes
#1. Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too?
Robert Fisk
#2. People turn to violence, because they have no other avenue left.
Robert Fisk
#3. The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.
Robert Fisk
#4. Individuals in various countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia listen to the tapes of bin Laden. They gather in groups of four or five. They feel they want to do something to express their support for what they've heard. The idea that they were taking orders is a particularly Western idea.
Robert Fisk
#5. 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.
Robert Fisk
#6. And history s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.
Robert Fisk
#7. There is a simple rule, anyone whose cellphone rings while I am speaking will be sold immediately into slavery
Robert Fisk
#8. 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.
Robert Fisk
#9. 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.
Robert Fisk
#10. 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.
Robert Fisk
#11. 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.
Robert Fisk
#12. In one way, I fear all Damascus is a dungeon. Or do you have to live here to appreciate that?
Robert Fisk
#13. It was, I think in retrospect, the most dramatic individual personal act I have ever seen a soldier take. The mighty powers may try to cover up, but the little people can still sometimes win.
Robert Fisk
#14. Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists.
Robert Fisk
#15. 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.
Robert Fisk
#16. I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.
Robert Fisk
#17. Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt - got rid of them.
Robert Fisk
#18. 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.
Robert Fisk
#19. No militia or political leader is so powerful - his name never so influential - as when he is dead, enshrined on wall posters and gateposts amid naively painted clusters of tulips and roses, the final artistic accolade of every armed martyr in Lebanon.
Robert Fisk
#20. 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.'
Robert Fisk
#21. The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.
Robert Fisk
#22. The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez's interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar.
Robert Fisk
#23. 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.
Robert Fisk
#24. When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.
Robert Fisk
#25. 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.
Robert Fisk
#26. Some of the guys in the Northern Alliance are war criminals. One of the Northern Alliance commanders ran a slave girl network in Kabul in 1994. Remember that there was a period when every woman on the streets was at risk of being raped. This was the Northern Alliance period of glory.
Robert Fisk
#27. 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.
Robert Fisk
#28. It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers.
Robert Fisk
#29. 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.
Robert Fisk
#30. 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.
Robert Fisk
#31. 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.
Robert Fisk
#32. 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.
Robert Fisk
#33. Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist.
Robert Fisk
#34. Bin Laden was very keen to point out to me that his forces had fought the Americans in Somalia. He also wanted to talk about how many mullahs in Pakistan were putting up posters saying, "We follow bin Laden." He even produced a sort of Kodak set of snapshots of graffiti supporting him.
Robert Fisk
#35. There is nothing so satisfying as to be shot at without effect.
Robert Fisk
#36. 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.
Robert Fisk
#37. 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.
Robert Fisk
#38. Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.
Robert Fisk
#39. Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the 'liberating' kind.
Robert Fisk
#40. 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.
Robert Fisk
#41. 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?
Robert Fisk
#42. 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.
Robert Fisk
#43. 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.
Robert Fisk
#44. Equal time is not necessary when dealing with evil. Nazis do not merit equal or fair treatment.
Robert Fisk
#45. Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, "them" and "us," victory or defeat. But 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.
Robert Fisk
#46. I wouldn't say I was part of an anti-war campaign.
Robert Fisk
#47. In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.
Robert Fisk
#49. 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.
Robert Fisk
#50. 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.
Robert Fisk
#52. And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.
Robert Fisk
#53. 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.
Robert Fisk
#54. 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.
Robert Fisk
#55. The word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.
Robert Fisk
#56. 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.
Robert Fisk
#57. When I visited Syrian special forces along the front lines, I was given extraordinary amounts of detail. They gave me the code numbers for the various positions they've got, told me where the rebels were - about 800 meters away in a forest. I met soldiers who had been wounded but were still serving.
Robert Fisk
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