Top 100 Afghan Quotes
#1. I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now, when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change.
Patti Smith
#2. They will kill me but they will not kill my voice, because it will be the voice of all Afghan women. You can cut the flower, but you cannot stop the coming of spring.
Malalai Joya
#3. After the Soviet withdrawal, many Afghan Communists had rebranded themselves as Islamists and joined the mujahedeen.
Anand Gopal
#4. If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan.
Asne Seierstad
#5. Watching young Afghan skaters in the film 'Skateistan' made me realize why I've spent my entire life as a skateboarder.
Stacy Peralta
#6. Definitely in the West, we're all cast as the same now. Whether you're Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Iranian, Afghan or whatever, you just get thrown into this category. And nine times out of 10, you're depicted as bad.
Maz Jobrani
#7. After spending time in the East and meeting with ordinary Afghans there, it's hard to imagine how a future Afghan government will retain control of provinces such as Khost or Paktia once U.S. forces are gone.
Joby Warrick
#8. After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.
Richard Engel
#9. Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Afghan President Hamid Karzai held wide-ranging talks in Kabul on Wednesay on the political and security situation in
Anonymous
#10. If it is terrorism, if it is war on terror, then the Afghan people will join you on terror.
Hamid Karzai
#11. The reasoning for our civil-military plan is that lasting success will be when the Afghan government, security forces and people can resist the insurgents and terrorists themselves.
Bob Ainsworth
#12. The majority of the Afghan people support a strategic partnership with the United States.
Hamid Karzai
#13. In 1979, when I was toddler, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and my whole family fled to Vienna, Virginia. Far from home, my parents were determined to raise my two sisters and me according to Afghan traditions.
Azita Ghanizada
#14. Foreign aid projects have pumped billions of dollars into the Afghan economy.
Richard Engel
#15. Patrick: America is at war with an Afghan tribe...[?]
David: Yeah, it's a, uh, long story.
A.G. Riddle
#16. Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?
George Lakoff
#17. Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'.
Svetlana Alexievich
#18. I was against the Iraq war I was against the Afghan war I was against bombing Libya and Syria but to be quite honest and with a heavy heart because more innocent people are gonna be killed....We have to step in and help wipeout ISIS!
Cal Sarwar
#19. Seeing the Afghan women in their burqas, it's easy to say, "Well, they're not as fully aware as I am, so why do I have to worry so much about their plight?" But that's a misunderstanding. They are brutally aware of their station.
Eliza Griswold
#20. Afghan society is very complex, and Afghanistan has a very complex culture. Part of the reason it has remained unknown is because of this complexity.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
#21. In the Afghan people, I found the most resilient, welcoming people who, for the first time in my career, never judged me over my right to tell this story - as a woman or a foreigner. A people who cherish their culture and history and the films that have captured that culture.
Pietra Brettkelly
#22. The family is the single most important institution in Afghan culture. It is described in the country's constitution as the 'fundamental pillar of society'.
Asne Seierstad
#23. I do spend a lot of weekends on the road. I have to pace myself. It can be pretty busy, but I'm not out in the Afghan desert with 70 pounds on my back, away from my family for a year at a time. I keep a good perspective on it.
Gary Sinise
#24. The most significant thing is public participation. That assures the Afghan public that our promises are not empty.
Ashraf Ghani
#25. It is time we accept there's no Cronkite moment for Afghanistan. Perhaps it's time we value the hearts and minds of our own over distant Afghan tribes.
Tiffany Madison
#26. I was traumatised in the medieval Afghan society at Sarana village by the local boys of Omar's Taliban who forced my in-laws to subjugate me for trying to be different. There can be Omars in other religions, too, who oppress women.
Sushmita Banerjee
#27. It's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai.
Bruce Sterling
#28. Over the past 30 years, hand grenades, tanks, fighter jets, missiles, helicopters and assault rifles have replaced traditional floral patterns in rug making and other textiles. Depicting these realities of war has helped the Afghan people to survive during times of conflict.
Henri Cole
#29. If you look back historically, admittedly a long time ago, there were three Afghan wars in which Britain didn't even come a good second. In more recent years the Russians were there with 120,000 men for ten years.
John Major
#30. As a 22-year Army Veteran who served in Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, and as a Civilian Advisor to the Afghan Army in Operation Enduring Freedom, I understand both the gravity of giving the order, and the challenge of carrying it out.
Allen West
#31. It's fair to say average Americans think that the average Afghan doesn't want American troops in their country.
Ashraf Ghani
#32. We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.
Colin Powell
#33. I mean, how many men would have gone on to the floor of the House as Carolyn Maloney did and wear a burkha to show the fight of Afghan women.
Eleanor Smeal
#34. You must keep in mind that Pakistan has suffered the aftermaths of the Cold War, and that Cold War had left deep imprints on our society. We were the worst sufferers from the ills of the Afghan war.
Asif Ali Zardari
#35. Since 1996, the Feminist Majority Foundation has been immersed in a campaign to support Afghan women and girls in their fight against the brutal oppression of the Taliban.
Eleanor Smeal
#36. Protecting Afghan civilians is the cornerstone of our mission.
John R. Allen
#37. Being born with power, as a boy, doesn't necessarily spur innovation. But being born entirely without it forces innovation in women, who must learn to survive almost from the moment they are born. Afghan women do not need much well-intentioned training on that.
Jenny Nordberg
#38. As the country now turns a new leaf, our ambition is to give hope to each and every Afghan.
Hamid Karzai
#39. Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.
Svetlana Alexievich
#40. If you're an Afghan village leader in a small town down around Kandahar somewhere, and you know that the footprint is getting smaller for your security, and the Taliban saying don't forget, I'm going to be back real soon, who is your loyalty going to go through?
Mike Rogers
#41. It is painful to talk about it, but even with its 110,000 elite soldiers, the Soviet Union never managed to gain control over the entire Afghan territory.
Sergei Ivanov
#42. While the Taliban connives with foreign terrorists, the Afghan people suffer from poverty, drought and hunger
Jack Straw
#43. I'm sorry, Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.
Khaled Hosseini
#44. I myself had to grow a longer beard and Afghan clothes. I was in danger of being kidnapped by smugglers, though I didn't know it at the time.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
#45. Now, al Qaeda's on the run. Afghanistan is no longer a base of operations. The Afghan government is a friendly government that is trying to bring democracy to its people.
Condoleezza Rice
#46. The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
Asne Seierstad
#47. In 2012, I received a phone call from the family of Arsala Rahmani, the Afghan senator with whom I'd become friendly. That morning, a gunman had pulled up alongside Rahmani's vehicle, idling in a crowded intersection, and shot him point blank.
Anand Gopal
#48. The Afghan government is as corrupt as a prostitute with a law degree.
Craig Ferguson
#49. If American forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to do what to America? Don't say you're worried about what they will do to the Afghan people. If that was America's concern, America's operational presence there would be much different.
Henry Rollins
#51. The Afghan War has clearly reached a stage similar to that moment at your child's party where you realise you've forgotten to give the other parents a pick up time.
Jeremy Hardy
#52. The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens.
David Petraeus
#53. Carolyn Maloney led the fight to make sure that DNA evidence kits are processed and passed the Debbie Smith Bill. She, when no one almost would listen to us on the whole issue of the Taliban and its treatment of women, she helped pass the Afghan Women's Empowerment Act.
Eleanor Smeal
#54. As I have said for two years now, when Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, it was wrong to outsource the job of capturing them to Afghan warlords who a week earlier were fighting against us.
John F. Kerry
#55. Why don't we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.
Al Franken
#56. Many Afghan intellectuals in the United States believe that their country is best kept together. They are encouraged by the fact that no leading tribal or political figure there has called for secession.
Stephen Kinzer
#57. They [U.S. soldiers] are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan.
Sarah Palin
#58. We've got to see a state where the Afghan government can handle its own day-to-day security.
Stephen Harper
#59. Come on, I said, taking his hand. Clutching the afghan with the other hand, he trailed down the hall after me, a snow white giant in tiny red underwear.
Charlaine Harris
#60. But the war on terror as I have repeatedly said in the past, and the Afghan people believe in it, in truth, is that the war on terror is not in the Afghan villages or homes. Its in the sanctuaries, it is in the training grounds, its in the motivation factors and the money that comes to it.
Hamid Karzai
#61. We are not in Afghanistan because girls were not allowed to go to school, but helping them do so will give the Afghan people hope for a better future.
Bob Ainsworth
#62. Carolyn Maloney has been a consistent fighter for Afghan women but also for International Family Planning Bills.
Eleanor Smeal
#63. I mean, honestly, we have to be clear that the life for many Afghan women is not that much different than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. The country has lived with so much violence and conflict that many people, men and women, just want it to be over.
Hillary Clinton
#64. The United States supports the reintegration of people who have fought with the Taliban into Afghan society provided they: one, renounce al Qaeda, two, lay down their arms and renounce violence, and three, participate in the public political life of the country in accordance with the constitution.
Richard Holbrooke
#65. There are tens of thousands of interactions every single day across Afghanistan between the Afghan troops and International Security Assistance Force. On most of those, every single day we continue to deepen and broaden the relationship we seek.
John R. Allen
#67. When I first got famous, Greg Dulli was also just starting to cook with the Afghan Whigs, and because of the MTV awards I met Dave Grohl and Nirvana and all these rock and roll bands. So I had experience with what it was like when people were taking off at that time.
Denis Leary
#68. In Afghan culture, you don't date - you marry. Even talking to boys before marriage brings great shame to your family.
Azita Ghanizada
#69. Across the hall, Paul was either fucking the girl or murdering her, I couldn't tell which. I smelled mothballs. The afghan was going to have to go.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#70. Nine out of ten Afghan women will experience domestic abuse in some form,
Jenny Nordberg
#71. To understand Afghanistan, you have to face the stress the average Afghan deals with.
Hyder Akbar
#72. If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate
sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school.
Khaled Hosseini
#73. Afghan human rights campaigners worry that U.S. forces may be using secret detention sites like the one allegedly at Rish-Khor to carry out interrogations away from prying eyes. The U.S. military, however, denies even having knowledge of the facility.
Anand Gopal
#74. Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
Salman Rushdie
#75. In all the debate about Afghanistan, we don't hear much about our obligation to the wretched lives of Afghan women. They are being treated as collateral damage as the big boys discuss geopolitical goals.
Tina Brown
#76. Now, look you here, Sekundar," says I, but he came up straight like a little bantam and cut me off.
"Sir Alexander. if you please," says he icily, as though I'd never seen him with his breeches down, chasing after some big Afghan bint.
George MacDonald Fraser
#77. We could form a government of national unity fighting corruption. The ordinary Afghan is sick and tired of it, because it's she or he that pays the price.
Ashraf Ghani
#79. I didn't want kabobs, Afghan music, and rules that required girls to be carefully monitored. I wanted mac and cheese, country music, and independence.
Azita Ghanizada
#80. Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.
Khaled Hosseini
#81. The dangers of an Afghan collapse are many: Afghan deaths, a loss of American prestige, a loss of NATO prestige, a moral blow to U.S. troops and veterans, a Taliban resurgence, huge setbacks for women, and greater power for Pakistan and Pakistani extremists.
Richard Engel
#82. We're probably going to see some post-2014 military presence - some U.S. presence and a NATO presence - and while we've got much work to do in the next 29 months, we'll have additional time later for the continued professionalization of the Afghan security forces.
John R. Allen
#83. I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.
George Packer
#84. We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others.
Narendra Modi
#85. Afghan villages traditionally ran their own affairs, each valley a law unto itself. Afghanistan never enjoyed much of a central government.
Daniel P. Bolger
#86. Next a big package was ransacked:inside, a pretty blue afghan. It overwhelmed her that in a store, thinking of his daughter, her father's impulse had been to wrap her in softness.
Debra Anastasia
#87. The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.
Richard Engel
#88. What about Andrews? He doing any better? She spotted him near the entrance of the hangar, talking to one of the Afghan locals who worked as a janitor. The guys rarely talked to her
Kaylea Cross
#89. We as the Afghan people and government are willing to help Pakistan work for peace in Afghanistan and work for peace in Pakistan, together.
Hamid Karzai
#90. Today the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of all of us.
George W. Bush
#91. Well, the reports are correct that we're conducting very robust military operations on the Afghan side of the border in areas where we think al-Qaida is operating and Taliban remnants are.
John Abizaid
#92. Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom.
Jenny Nordberg
#93. The first time I visited Afghanistan in May 2000, I was 26 years old, and the country was under Taliban rule. I went there to document Afghan women and landmine victims.
Lynsey Addario
#94. Once the Afghan people vote and they choose their President with direct, secret ballot from all over the country, there will be a lot of difference in this country and a lot of legitimate power to flow with implementation.
Hamid Karzai
#95. It's the Afghan national army that went into Najaf and did the work there.
George W. Bush
#96. The Afghan security forces will always have the help of the U.S. American military to ensure that Afghanistan never fails.
Lindsey Graham
#97. I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.
Khaled Hosseini
#98. We provide transit facilities, we cooperate in equipping the Afghan army and security forces with arms and helicopters, we cooperate in training officers for law enforcement agencies.
Sergei Lavrov
#99. I tried to render the Afghan war as much as I could fro the perspective of the Afghans. I have served as an advisor to Afghan troops, and much of my war experience was seen through the lens of fighting that war alongside Afghan soldiers.
Elliot Ackerman
#100. It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission.
Arundhati Roy
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