Peter Bergen Quotes

#1. I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them.

William Gibson

#2. I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden's head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader's face.

Peter L. Bergen

#3. I'm a gentleman.

Rod Stewart

#4. Often it is important to listen to what people aren't saying.

Peter L. Bergen

#5. It was a counter-attack and I had to take him down. I don't regret it and I would do it again if I had to.

Thomas Gravesen

#6. Being a hater is a measurement of cowardice.

Steve Maraboli

#7. We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011.

Peter L. Bergen

#8. Negotiations with religious fanatics who have delusions of grandeur generally do not go well.

Peter L. Bergen

#9. In February I secured permission to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed and where he had lived for the last half-decade of his life; the first, and only, journalist to do so.

Peter L. Bergen

#10. Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.

Peter L. Bergen

#11. And in the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound surrounded by his wives and children and far from the front lines of his holy war.

Peter L. Bergen

#12. I am very suspicious of the notion that somehow bin Laden was a media creation ... Bin Laden's actions made him into a big deal. Not the media.

Peter L. Bergen

#13. There's some pretty good academic research that suggest that what Americans don't like is losing.

Peter Bergen

#14. At one point people in al Qaeda were actually drawing monthly paychecks when they were based in Sudan.

Peter L. Bergen

#15. Most Muslims don't want to live in some Taliban-style utopia, which is what bin Laden and allied groups are offering.

Peter Bergen

#16. Humor is a show of both strength and of vulnerability: you are willing to make the first move but you are trusting in the response of your listener.

Gina Barreca

#17. The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

Peter L. Bergen

#18. Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

Peter L. Bergen

#19. Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible.

Peter Bergen

#20. So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.

Peter L. Bergen

#21. I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden ... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

Peter L. Bergen

#22. Every good fairy tale has a kernel of truth to it.

Melissa Grey

#23. If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.

Peter Bergen

#24. Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies ... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.

Peter L. Bergen