Lebanon's Quotes

#1. If the [captured Israeli] soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years.

Dan Halutz

#2. Once the violence has ceased, the US should immediately call on the World Bank and other international institutions to convene a donors conference to rebuild Lebanon's shattered infrastructure.

John Conyers

#3. I announce the resignation of the government, perhaps as the only way for Lebanon's main political blocs to assume their responsibilities and come together to pull Lebanon out of an unknown tunnel.

Najib Mikati

#4. Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.

P. J. O'Rourke

#5. The Israelis are very smart about politics and strategy, but there are a few exceptions. One is Lebanon, the other is Gaza, where they were completely inept.

Daniel Pipes

#6. Our priority is still the liberation of our land and the protection of Lebanon from the Israeli threat.

Hassan Nasrallah

#7. The American administration is trying to achieve any gain in the shadow of the embarrassment hitting it because of its failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine after the failure of Israel's war on Lebanon and the retreat of America's project in the region.

Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah

#8. In the past there was a difference between the conditions in which Hizballah operated in Lebanon and the conditions of resistance operated in Palestine.

Ahmed Yassin

#9. When Lebanon started its resistance it was a small and divided country.

Bashar Al-Assad

#10. Iran has basically propped up Assad, who has waged an absolute war of horror against the Syrian people. And he has done anything he could to stay in power with the full support of the Iranians and including Iranian troops and Hezbollah from Lebanon, which are an Iranian proxy.

Hillary Clinton

#11. My own agenda is going to be followed, and that agenda is to maintain very good relations with the international community, and Lebanon has to fulfill its commitments.

Najib Mikati

#12. Hezbollah is not fighting for Syria. Hezbollah is not fighting for Iran. Hezbollah is fighting for Lebanon.

Hassan Nasrallah

#13. If we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, Islamic jihadism is on the rise. And they continue, as we see in Lebanon, to seek to destroy the State of Israel and seek to drive America back and bring us to our knees. We must stand tall and straight.

Zach Wamp

#14. Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

Noam Chomsky

#15. Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there.

Elliott Abrams

#16. The military operation in Lebanon was the most successful military operation in recent Israeli history. Many in Israel don't recognise that.

Ehud Olmert

#17. Lebanon is our country, and in it we are staying (as a minority christians).

Samir Geagea

#18. I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

June Jordan

#19. Israel has many hopes, and faces extreme dangers. The most prominent danger is Iran, which is making every effort to acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and establishing an enormous terror network together with Syria in Lebanon.

Ariel Sharon

#20. We want to see Israel withdraw from our territory. But we don't want to be accountable vis-a-vis Israel on the security basis, because we don't see, in the absence of a peace agreement, that Lebanon can really be accountable to Israel if anything happens.

Rafik Hariri

#21. In dealing with Syria's dictator ... only force counts. No cease-fire was attainable in Lebanon until the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey started shelling Syria's proxies; suddenly, sweet reason prevailed in Damascus.

William Safire

#22. Nothing is safe [in Lebanon], as simple as that.

Dan Halutz

#23. Middle East by the Arab Muslim caliphate, ending with Muslim fragmentation and the Iranian Buyid capture of Abbasid Baghdad, saw Muslim and Maronite establishment in Mount Lebanon.

William Harris

#24. My mother was an immigrant from Lebanon to the United States. She came when she was 18 years old in 1920.

George J. Mitchell

#25. Very few people are fortunate enough to walk through countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and I had seen them all. I had spoken to many on the street.

Ashleigh Banfield

#26. Lebanon can choose to be either a partner in ridding the scourge of terrorism or another obstacle that cows to the most radical elements of society.

Vito Fossella

#27. In Lebanon, it's never over for anyone. You cannot write off anyone or anything in this country.

Saad Hariri

#28. Lebanon is the only country where media kills more than bombs, injures more than guns ... and at last they say freedom of speech ...

Hussein S. Hariri

#29. There are over 1 million refugees in Lebanon, a country of 4 million people. How do we solve that? I have no idea. What's going on, I really don't know.

Rabih Alameddine

#30. People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#31. There are only two ways to remove the president - if he violates the constitution or commits high treason. How could anyone accuse me of treason after I had terminated Israel's occupation of South Lebanon in 2000.

Emile Lahoud

#32. Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.

Yoko Ono

#33. I was not in favor of U.S. troops in Lebanon. And I voted against it.

John Kasich

#34. Fear and hatred are the legacy of Ronald Reagan. America's vision of peace and freedom [is being] blasted by the guns of the U.S. Navy in Lebanon, the guns of U.S. paratroopers in Grenada, and the guns of U.S. helicopters in Honduras and El Salvador.

Alan Cranston

#35. Lebanon, of course, is a country with great problems. Traditionally, they have religious-national groups or ethnic-national groups. They have the Druses. Even the two Moslem sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites, are apart. Then they have the armed groups. Everybody's got a private army.

Menachem Begin

#36. I was 12 when my parents told me we were moving to Lebanon. I remember thinking, 'Leba-who?' I had absolutely no concept of the place.

Greg Kinnear

#37. I rejected the armed struggle because, as a Christian, I am committed to a nonviolent and peaceful struggle. But people take their own initiatives, because it is a Lebanon type of situation here.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi

#38. That U.N. Security Council resolution requires getting Syrian troops and intelligence officials out of Lebanon so that the Lebanese can have elections here this spring that are free and fair and free of outside influence.

Stephen Hadley

#39. The Chinese, by their favourite system of dwarfing, contrive to make it, when only a foot and a half or two feet high, have all the characters of an aged cedar of Lebanon.

Robert Fortune

#40. Israel is the number one rogue state threat to Middle Eastern peace with its nuclear arms and acts of outright aggression towards its peaceful neighbours Syria and Lebanon - and genocidal actions against the marginalised Palestinians of the West Bank - and Gaza in particular.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#41. Violence would be a huge gift to those who want a divided Lebanon.

Saad Hariri

#42. Don't forget that the peace treaties with Egypt and later with Jordan have already survived several tests: two wars with Lebanon, two Palestinian uprisings, the attack on Gaza, the murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Tom Segev

#43. Lebanon will be engulfed again in a huge power game that will last quite a long time. This is the tragic destiny of Lebanon.

Walid Jumblatt

#44. They've (Israel) lost the battle for public opinion. They claim it's because American Jews know too little.. I claim it's because they know too much about the conflict, and young liberal Jews have difficulty defending the use of cluster bombs in Lebanon or supporting the Israeli settlements.

Norman Finkelstein

#45. The President of Iran has called for the destruction of Israel and the West and has even denied the holocaust took place. Iran and its terrorist arm Hezbollah are responsible for the current conflicts between Israel and Lebanon.

Michael McCaul

#46. Lebanon was under Israeli occupation, up to its capital, but we did not consider that a disaster. Why? Because it was very clear that there are ways to resist.

Bashar Al-Assad

#47. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.

Noam Chomsky

#48. 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

#49. I have a friendship with Hezbollah, and I also have contacts outside of Lebanon, but it doesn't mean I follow anyone's agenda.

Najib Mikati

#50. There must be some security arrangement in the south of Lebanon so northern Israel is not threatened anymore.

Menachem Begin

#51. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the U.N. vetoed several resolutions right away, calling for an end to the fighting and so on, and that was a hideous invasion.

Noam Chomsky

#52. The actions of the terrorist organizations, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Hamas, in Gaza, against Israel are unconscionable. Instead of working towards peace, these terrorist organizations have chosen to perpetuate the violence.

Alcee Hastings

#53. If I'm still walking, I am not dead. So I have to still walk and run towards the benefit of Lebanon.

Najib Mikati

#54. Nothing is very constant in Beirut. Certainly not dreams. But despair isn't constant either. Beirut is a city to be loved and hated a thousand times a day. Every day. It is exhausting, but it is also beautiful.

Nasri Atallah

#55. As soon as the legitimate Lebanese government is convinced that the conditions have ripened and that Lebanon is able to maintain stability on its own ... Then, the Syrian forces will return to their homeland.

Bashar Al-Assad

#56. We're going to take out seven countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran

Wesley Clark

#57. My family moved - first to Washington, D.C., and then, in the spring of 1975, to Lebanon, where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move, so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.

Greg Kinnear

#58. The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.

Sara Paretsky

#59. Israel is becoming a fortress. Fences along the borders with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria.

Richard Engel

#60. Hezbollah and the government are only two of 18 political factions in Lebanon, most of them armed. There are militant Christian groups, Palestinian radicals, al-Qaida, Druze militias and even armed bands of Marxists still operating in Lebanon.

Richard Engel

#61. All the earth is at rest and is quiet: they are bursting into song. Even the trees of the wood are glad over you, the trees of Lebanon, saying, From the time of your fall no wood-cutter has come up against us with an axe.

Isaiah

#62. the people of Lebanon' were offering a 'model' and a 'strong proof that it is not only Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem which Arab armies and peoples are capable of liberating, but - with one small decision and a bit of determination - [the whole of] Palestine too, from the river to the sea'.4

David Hirst

#63. Israel should withdraw from all the areas which it won from the Arabs in 1967, and in particular Israel should withdraw completely from the Golan Heights, from south Lebanon and from the West Bank.

Nelson Mandela

#64. Lebanon is caught in a cycle of threats. And it is our duty to be strong and capable of defending our country. But we will not clarify or explain what we do or do not possess.

Hassan Nasrallah

#65. Because I know about the Holy Land, I've taught lessons about the Holy Land all my life, and - but you can't bring peace to Israel without giving the Palestinian also peace. And Lebanon and Jordan and Syria as well.

Jimmy Carter

#66. I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

Ziad Doueiri

#67. Israel lost their power to intimidate during the second war with Lebanon.

Hassan Nasrallah

#68. Arab leaders worry more about making money from the profits they get from oil and gas that they turn the other way when Lebanon is being destroyed right next to them. Their neighbours are being murdered, but they only make calculations for their own benefit.

Abu Bakar Bashir

#69. Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.

J.M. Coetzee

#70. My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Kai Bird

#71. Lebanon: the country where everyone wants a piece while we want peace.

Sandra Chami Kassis

#72. The problem with our region is that there are areas with oil and too much money, and then there are places such as south Lebanon and the Palestinian territories where there is no work, and instead of developing industry, they become dependent on oil money - this results in extremism.

Stef Wertheimer

#73. Those who liberated the South from Israel must show allegiance to Lebanon.

Walid Jumblatt

#74. Did you ever notice they never take any fat hostages? You never see a guy coming out of Lebanon going: I was held hostage for seven months and I lost 175 pounds, I feel good and I look good and I learned self-discipline. That's the important thing.

Denis Leary

#75. In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.

George Clooney

#76. When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn't stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.

Douglas Brinkley

#77. For Lebanon to have any future, gotta adopt a resolute policy v/s terrorism. Whoever plots against the land should bear the consequences.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#78. That is why if Lebanon concludes a peace agreement with Israel and brings that accord to the Parliament our deputies will reject it; Hezbollah refuses any conciliation with Israel in principle.

Hassan Nasrallah

#79. We must now make clear to Lebanon that it will not benefit from U.S. assistance and support as long as it harbors this brutal terrorist and murder.

Jim DeMint

#80. And as I was looking at those towers that were destroyed in Lebanon, it occurred to me that we have to punish the transgressor with the same, and that we had to destroy the towers in America, so that they taste what we tasted and they stop killing our women and children.

Osama Bin Laden

#81. At this moment, my soul is in Lebanon, my heart in Paris, and my body in New York.

Ameen Rihani

#82. 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

#83. The source of the terror in Lebanon as in Iraq is to be found in the Koran and in the despotisms of the Arab Middle East.

David Horowitz

#84. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the UN Security Council. This means, in effect, that a terror organization presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world's security. You couldn't make this thing up.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#85. We open our door, and we are still committed to open our door for our brothers in Syria. But doesn't mean that we should not keep alone. The international community should really - should really share Lebanon the numbers of refugees and share Lebanon the cost of their living.

Najib Mikati

#86. Iran also continues to provide seemingly "limitless support" to the Hezbollah terror organization in Lebanon. In 2006,

Joel C. Rosenberg

#87. The violence and burnings in Lebanon were the work of Syrian soldiers and workers dressed in civilian clothes.

Walid Jumblatt

#88. It is even more so when it comes to Iraq, which is a large Arab country with scientific, material, and human resources and is able to accomplish, at the least, what Lebanon accomplished, and more.

Bashar Al-Assad

#89. Geraldo has been in Lebanon. He has done some excellent reporting out of there, and of course, we now know by virtue of the president's speech on Tuesday night that the terrorist organizations that operate in that area are now on the list.

Brit Hume

#90. If there were 10,000 U.S. forces ashore [in Lebanon], authorized to move about, there would be less risk to American lives than there is with an immobile force of 1,300.

George Will

#91. I opposed the U.S. involvement in Lebanon. We ended up having to withdraw our marines after our barracks were blown up.

John Kasich

#92. 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

#93. Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state?

Barry Goldwater

#94. My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow & rising in the evening as farmers return from their fields and vineyards.You have your Lebanon and its people. I have my Lebanon and its people.

Khalil Gibran

#95. Lebanon is restless, Syria got its walking papers, Egypt is scheduling elections with more than one candidate, and even Saudi Arabia, whose rulers are perhaps more terrified of women than rulers anywhere else in the world, allowed limited municipal elections.

Suzanne Fields

#96. We are very serious about imposing weapons restrictions on the PFLP and other Palestinian groups operating from their camps in Lebanon.

Walid Jumblatt

#97. 10How fair is your love, My sister, my spouse! How much better than wine is your love, And the scent of your perfumes Than all spices! 11Your lips, O my spouse, Drip as the honeycomb; Honey and milk are under your tongue; And the fragrance of your garments Is like the fragrance of Lebanon.

Anonymous

#98. Any Israeli attack on Lebanon, Iran, Syria or Gaza will be met with a fierce response.

Hassan Nasrallah

#99. In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.

Rabih Alameddine

#100. The main problem that we have in Lebanon, and in the region, is we don't have a real peace process and I think this is the main focal problem that we have in the region.

Saad Hariri