Top 100 Elliott Abrams Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian 'parliament' voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity.
Elliott Abrams
#3. Obama isn't good off the cuff, especially when challenged; he is far better with a prepared speech.
Elliott Abrams
#4. Being an Arab leader has its rewards: the suite at the Waldorf-Astoria during the United Nations General Assembly, travel in your own plane, plenty of cash, even job security - whether kings, sheiks or presidents, with or without elections, most serve for life.
Elliott Abrams
#5. 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
#7. During most of the Bush administration, human rights and democracy in Egypt were on the front burner.
Elliott Abrams
#8. Is multilateralism nothing more than a dodge for simple inaction?
Elliott Abrams
#9. During the election campaign of 2000, it was generally thought that then-governor Bush didn't know much about foreign policy or national security affairs, and that Colin Powell would lead on that front, while the president's main concern would be domestic.
Elliott Abrams
#10. The Obama administration appears to regard intelligence leaks and briefings more or less like briefings by the Democratic National Committee or White House flack Jay Carney. You use any information at hand, classified or not, and you spin it any way you like, fairly or not.
Elliott Abrams
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Reagan did not wait out the Soviets; he beat them.
Elliott Abrams
#14. 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
#15. At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.
Elliott Abrams
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Bahai Iranians are barred from holding government jobs, their children are excluded from the nation's university system, their marriages are not recognized and their cemeteries and holy places have been desecrated. It is government policy to incite hatred of Bahais in the official media.
Elliott Abrams
#19. On June 19, 1981, a vigorously healthy Justice Potter Stewart resigned from the Supreme Court at the age of 66.
Elliott Abrams
#20. 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
#21. If you are trying to raise a child to be a Jew, then you have to create a sense of Jewish identity. You really weaken that sense of identity if you celebrate two religions.
Elliott Abrams
#22. 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
#23. Persecution of Christians is growing around the world, and Congress needs to pay more attention to it.
Elliott Abrams
#24. The presence of jihadis in Syria should be no surprise.
Elliott Abrams
#26. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders - leaders not compromised by terror.
Elliott Abrams
#27. 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
#28. The Right is simply more pro-Israel than the Left.
Elliott Abrams
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Terrorism exploded after the Camp David talks broke down in 2000 because the Palestinians' leader at the time, Yasser Arafat, supported it.
Elliott Abrams
#32. The way for the Palestinians to get a state is to go ahead and build it.
Elliott Abrams
#33. Gadhafi has established no national institutions, not even allowing a fake parliament of the Mubarak or Ben Ali variety that could perhaps be turned into something real.
Elliott Abrams
#34. For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.
Elliott Abrams
#35. Tunisia is small - just ten million, no great natural resources.
Elliott Abrams
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Honduras was the original 'banana republic,' and its poverty remains extreme.
Elliott Abrams
#39. The Assad regime has lost the consent of the governed, and it is difficult to see how a replacement Alawite regime would be able to regain this consent.
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. 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
#42. Legislation for the Caribbean basin has led to more jobs in the Dominican Republic.
Elliott Abrams
#43. Two presidents pursued human rights policies that were serious and effective: Reagan and George W. Bush. They understood that American support for human rights activists is a moral imperative for us and also makes the world safer for us.
Elliott Abrams
#44. It is a keen measure of the fall of American influence in the region when a Palestinian leader responds to intense American pressure to go to the negotiating table by waiting to see if Arab League foreign ministers will let him take that step.
Elliott Abrams
#45. Israel and the Palestinians had been at the table together for decades until the Obama/Mitchell/Rahm Emanuel decision to demand a total end to Israeli construction froze not the settlements but the diplomacy.
Elliott Abrams
#46. 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
#47. While Israelis do not care too much about Europeans moral judgments, the E.U. is an important market for them, and European sanctions of any kind would be harmful to Israel.
Elliott Abrams
#48. The threat that Syria might transfer more advanced weapons to Hezbollah has existed for a long time.
Elliott Abrams
#49. 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
#50. In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times.
Elliott Abrams
#52. Rahm Emanuel seems to think he knows Israel very well, and that the way to treat that country and its democratically-elected government is the way he treats all opponents in politics: by attacking and attacking.
Elliott Abrams
#53. The Egyptian military and the government of Israel have long had a common interest in maintaining order and fighting terrorism in Sinai.
Elliott Abrams
#56. Thousands of members of Congress have come and gone over the years, their individual achievements hidden in committee reports, private compromises, amendments pushed through or blocked, and innumerable, unnoticed meetings.
Elliott Abrams
#57. While Argentina, Brazil, and Chile - what in textbooks used to be called the ABC countries - seem settled into democratic politics and free market economics, the Andean countries are in disarray.
Elliott Abrams
#58. Terrorists that kill Americans don't get released.
Elliott Abrams
#59. There is no way around the contradictions and dangers inherent in Israel's decision to free over 1,000 prisoners in order to liberate Gilad Shalit.
Elliott Abrams
#60. In 2004, President Bush gave Prime Minister Sharon certain guarantees about American policy, but the Obama administration treated those as a kind of private letter having no binding policy impact.
Elliott Abrams
#61. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror.
Elliott Abrams
#62. 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
#63. For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their 'freedom deficit' signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies.
Elliott Abrams
#64. I don't see kids with Palm Pilots. They are not common on college campuses, except among professors. Gen Xers don't need them. They are a phenomenon of the 50-something who can't remember if his broker's number ends in 1137 or 3317.
Elliott Abrams
#66. Nineteen-seventy-nine had been a year of American setbacks around the globe. Before the year began, Cuban troops were already roaming Angola, and a pro-Communist regime ruled Ethiopia.
Elliott Abrams
#67. 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
#68. Al Qaeda's message that violence, terrorism and extremism are the only answer for Arabs seeking dignity and hope is being rejected each day in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and throughout the Arab lands.
Elliott Abrams
#69. The Sandinistas are dedicated Communists, and if they are going to make a compromise with democracy, it's going to be under pressure.
Elliott Abrams
#70. 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
#71. Turkey's solidarity with Hamas is not, of course, based on Arab nationalism, which as a non-Arab nation it does not support. It is instead based on a definition of the Mideast conflict as one between Jews and Muslims, precisely the position of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Elliott Abrams
#72. People are entitled to believe the government is constantly lying to them, but it isn't.
Elliott Abrams
#73. The Obama administration has been trying out a new policy toward Syria since the day it came to office. The Bush cold shoulder was viewed as a primitive reaction, now to be replaced by sophisticated diplomacy. Outreach would substitute for isolation.
Elliott Abrams
#74. The best-armed and best-trained divisions of the Syrian army are Alawite.
Elliott Abrams
#75. 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
#76. President Obama has never summarized the Obama Doctrine with such clarity, but here is what it would look like: 'I will undertake any military attack against our enemies, regardless of the risks and collateral damage, so long as it is over by the time I have to announce it.'
Elliott Abrams
#77. Israel's flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
Elliott Abrams
#79. While foreign competitors, French or Japanese or German, merrily bid for contracts abroad, American companies find themselves tangled in a web of legislation designed to express disapproval, block trade in certain commodities, or perhaps deny resources to disfavored or hostile regimes.
Elliott Abrams
#80. In critical ways, Obama has reversed not just Bush policy but every president's approach to the world since the Second World War, save for that of his soulmate Jimmy Carter.
Elliott Abrams
#81. Pinochet took power in a 1973 military coup that the United States supported.
Elliott Abrams
#82. 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
#83. Tunisian liberals say that the U.S. Embassy in Tunis is unengaged with their efforts to make sure the Tunisian model remains one of expanding freedom.
Elliott Abrams
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. There is no softer target in GOP primaries than the United Nations and foreign-aid spending.
Elliott Abrams
#87. It's not good for Israel to govern millions of Palestinians.
Elliott Abrams
#88. Pundits are used to analyzing the gap between what our ideals suggest and what our security interests require.
Elliott Abrams
#89. At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat 94 percent of the West Bank; ten years later, Ehud Olmert offered Abbas 93.6 percent with a one-to-one land swap.
Elliott Abrams
#90. 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
#91. While all Alawites fear vengeance against their entire community should Assad fall, there are varying degrees of loyalty to the Assads.
Elliott Abrams
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. There isn't any way for the people of Nicaragua to find out what's going on in Nicaragua.
Elliott Abrams
#95. 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
#96. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, its influence and that of Hamas and Hezbollah are strengthened.
Elliott Abrams
#97. 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
#98. I want to be the first guy to reverse a communist revolution.
Elliott Abrams
#100. The Obama administration rarely demonstrated the ability to shift gears and change policy in its first year. Even in the face of historic events such as the continuing demonstrations against Iran's regime, it stuck devotedly to prior plans.
Elliott Abrams
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
