Top 100 Quotes About 11/9
#1. As long as Green Lantern is still dealing with fear, it's going to be relevant. 'Rebirth' really grew out of 9/11. 9/11 happened, and then two years later, I was writing about fear. It was obviously connected.
Geoff Johns
#2. 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
#3. My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.
David Remnick
#4. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire
Thomas L. Friedman
#5. Before 9/11, absolutely, there were concerns about terrorism; but the world fundamentally changed.
Richard Fadden
#6. A release on September 16 quoted the claim of the assistant secretary for labor at OSHA that tests show 'it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York's financial district.' (OSHA's responsibility extends only to indoor air quality for workers, however.)
National Commission On Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States
#7. Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it (9/11 event] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people.
Edward Said
#8. The 9/11 commission recommended the appointment of a national intelligence director with budgetary authority to better coordinate the work of the intelligence community and resolve differences.
Ronald Kessler
#9. I was in NYC during 9/11; it happened on a Tuesday, I was on stage Thursday. It was a small crowd, but it took about 10 days and comedy clubs were packed.
Bill Burr
#10. Why does a tragedy like 9/11 change everything about air travel, but numerous gun massacres CHANGE NOTHING?
Justine Bateman
#11. For years, even before 9/11, I've been trying to warn that the threat from amateur biolabs will ultimately turn out to be far more troublesome than leakage from military labs - perhaps even more costly and deadly than nuclear terrorism.
Greg Bear
#12. 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
#13. Companies are always being bought and sold. The markets are always moving; you have to be on top of your position. And in the U.S., the market is never closed for more than three days. The only time the market was ever closed was 9/11. I think it may have been closed the whole week.
Karen Finerman
#14. George W. Bush brought a lot of minorities into his administration, which was a positive thing, and they had some issues that they wanted to press, but 9/11 really gave them direction. It gave them a purpose.
Josh Brolin
#15. As a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, and associated forces, in response to the 9/11 attacks, and we may also use force consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense.
John O. Brennan
#16. 10. Both the North Tower and the South Tower collapsed just as their respective fires were dying down, even though this meant that the South Tower, which had been hit second, collapsed first.
David Ray Griffin
#17. Will someone please explain to me the logic that says we can trust someone with a Boeing 747 in bad weather but not with a Glock 9 millimeter?
Zell Miller
#18. 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
#19. the Christian who seems to be so overmatched, is yet so unconquerable, II Cor. 12:9; James 5:11.
William Gurnall
#20. Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.
Nick Turse
#21. Let me say what I actually believe. I believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, by Al Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden, and no one else trying to hurt America.
Van Jones
#22. It feels like last week, but in fact we're now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud ... and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11.
Tucker Elliot
#23. We've never made the case, or argued the case, that somehow Osama Bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming.
Dick Cheney
#24. The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
Matt Gallagher
#25. Isaiah 9:10: "The bricks have fallen, But we will rebuild with hewn stone; The sycamores have been cut down, But we will plant cedars in their place.1 "Now, Isaiah 9:11: "Therefore the LORD shall set up The adversaries of Rezin against him, And spur his enemies on.
Jonathan Cahn
#26. I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.
Lawrence Wright
#27. What happened in New York and Washington is the same thing that England and America did to Berlin every day for three years during World War II
and Germany did the same thing to England.
Lemmy Kilmister
#28. I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had.
David Levithan
#29. I was involved as deputy mayor in New York City on 9/11.
Joseph J. Lhota
#30. The country has sorted itself ideologically into the two political parties, and those partisan attachments have hardened in recent years. It will take an extraordinary event and act of leadership to break this partisan divide. I thought 9/11 might provide such an opportunity, but it was not seized.
Thomas E. Mann
#31. If we're successful in Iraq ... we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.
Dick Cheney
#32. I recommended to the president [George Bush] that our focus had to be on al-Qaida, the Taliban and Afghanistan. Those were the ones who attacked the United States of America on 9/11.
Colin Powell
#33. How can rogue terrorists in Iraq detonate bombs? They're all too busy flying kites with their children! Hasn't [Katrina vanden Heuvel (Queen of the May at the fun-loving Nation magazine)] seen Fahrenheit 9/11?
Ann Coulter
#34. There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge. It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.
Judith Butler
#35. After 9/11, the amount of applicants the FBI received increased exponentially. Whereas you used to require a college degree, and it was a small group of people who were just out of college, after 9/11, it changed.
Aaron Tveit
#36. I think the key that happened on 9/11 is we went from considering terrorist attacks as a law enforcement problem to considering terrorist attacks, especially on the scale we have on 9/11, as being an act of war.
Dick Cheney
#37. Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.
Hemant Mehta
#38. In June 2002, I had just finished 'Laurel Canyon' and decided to move back to Los Angeles after nearly a decade in New York. Post-9/11 New York felt different.
Lisa Cholodenko
#40. A lot of people consider 9/11 to be a tragedy, and in some ways it is, but I think there's also opportunity for a lot of humor there.
Zach Braff
#41. I think in the immediate days after 9/11, the administration acted very, very well. I liked the decisiveness of it.
Ann Richards
#42. In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.
Rebecca Solnit
#44. The world got side-tracked from development issues during the post-9/11 crisis period.
Jeffrey Sachs
#45. The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings, to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.
Jane Harman
#46. If someone did this Fahrenheit 9/11 to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes' destination of California - these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!
Michael Moore
#47. I think Americans are not guilty for 9/11; I think President Bush is not guilty for 9/11.
Condoleezza Rice
#48. He remembers which sister
I like least and asks
how she is doing.
(lines 9-11 of the poem 'Divorce')
Carrie Etter
#49. I asked for a glass of Chardonnay. And in a 9/11-like twist, they didn't have any. They offered me Pinot.
Amy Schumer
#50. The United States was attacked on 9/11/12, and we know who attacked us.
Leon Panetta
#51. In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.
Nancy Gibbs
#52. For weeks after 9/11 you could smell the dust and pulverised concrete in New York, and the National Guard came in, so there was a military presence on the streets. It was intense. Overwhelming. Heartbreaking.
Mark Boal
#53. I'm saying that there's way more to 9/11 than mainstream media and our government have told us.
Jesse Ventura
#54. On a bigger level, 9/11 was a crystallizing moment for my generation ... the bubble popped. We were like, 'Whoa, this is what the real world is like; it's not all fun and games.'
Matt Gallagher
#55. There are more good people than bad people, and overall there's more that's good in the world than there is that's bad. We just need to hear about it, we just need to see it.
Tucker Elliot
#56. I was a little bit perturbed by the whole big grief machine that grew out of 9/11. I knew that I wanted to write about it, but I wasn't sure about how to go about it.
Colum McCann
#57. It [9/11 tragedy] has affected us on so many levels: economically, morally, spiritually, ethically. It's been all over the place. A new American identity emerged - we now live in a very different America. This is the power of the definitive event.
Porochista Khakpour
#58. The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.
Maya Angelou
#59. We cannot continue to see the Middle East in the context of 9/11. We must see it in the context of 2011.
John F. Kerry
#60. What led to September 11 is that most decision makers in the White House thought like you. They supported despotic regimes in the Middle East to multiply the profits of oil and arms companies, and armed violence escalated and reached our shores.
Alaa Al Aswany
#61. But isn't there something wrong when I'm the only guy in the country that got fired for 9/11?
Bill Maher
#62. Long before 9/11 and the war in Iraq, a lot of people hated the United States and the West. But what the Iraqi war seems to have done, at least in ... I mean, I'm just reporting what I see from the people on the ground, is that it has silenced many pro-American forces in the Muslim world.
Yaroslav Trofimov
#63. Now how many people in their heart of hearts in that community want to see the demise of this country? How many would cheer, not out loud maybe, but in their heart when things like 9/11 occur and I'll tell you; it's a majority among them.
Tom Tancredo
#65. If I can be perfectly blunt, his humanities teacher was an ass.
Tucker Elliot
#67. I never believed 9/11, because I had engineering training at GA Tech, and I could tell when a building is being blown up by explosives. Any fool can look at those films and see the buildings aren't falling down, they're blowing up.
Paul Craig Roberts
#68. Some people in the west have responded to the terrorist attacks by trying to look for everything that is positive in Islam. I think that was a strong response after 9/11, was to try to reach out as positively as possible.
Mark Durie
#69. I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books.
Michael Connelly
#70. In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam.
Tucker Elliot
#71. It's hard to compare. Different times, different players. The administration four years ago did not have 9/11. I could tell you this; this particular administration was better suited to handle that than the former.
Montel Williams
#72. It [9/11 event] transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical. There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political organization and persuasion.
Edward Said
#73. I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, 'Well, I've had it with humanity.' But I was wrong.
Patton Oswalt
#74. I made The Instigator while I was homeless as a result of 9/11, and there was some stuff on there that was really raw and directly out of that experience
Rhett Miller
#75. 'Know your enemy, name your enemy' is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders.
Michelle Malkin
#76. My charity is in the business of helping firefighters in any way that we can. For instance, after 9/11 we were the second-fastest charity to raise and distribute money to the widows and surviving family members of the 343 firefighters who died that day.
Denis Leary
#77. The president finally explained why he sat in that classroom on 9/11 for 7 minutes after he was told the country was under attack. He said he was 'collecting his thoughts.' What a time to start a new hobby.'
Bill Maher
#78. After the 9/11 attacks, I dutifully stocked up on rolls of duct tape and N-95 masks, as the government recommended.
Dana Milbank
#79. We know from the material that was recovered from the bin Laden compound that bin Laden was looking at the 10th anniversary of 9/11 as an opportunity to strike yet again at the U.S. homeland.
John O. Brennan
#80. So many times after a catastrophe like 9/11, Estonia in Sweden, the Holocaust or whatever, we are so fond of lifting up the hero examples, but actually 99 percent of survivors have done something that they feel very guilty about.
Ruben Ostlund
#81. I ... you know, I ... look, after 9/11, I vowed to protect this country.
George W. Bush
#82. The near-term attacks ... will either rival or exceed the 9/11 attacks ... And it's pretty clear that the nation's capital and New York city would be on any list ...
Tom Ridge
#83. There is research on the effects of 9/11, and you know, compared to the enormity of it, it didn't have a huge effect on people's mood. They were going about their business, mostly.
Daniel Kahneman
#84. We want our government to protect us, to make sure something like 9/11 never happens again. We quickly moved to give law enforcement more power to do this. But that now begs the question, did we move to fast? Did we give too much power away? I don't have the answer.
Michael Connelly
#85. That infamous day was the most powerful reminder I have ever been given that you should never take life for granted and should treat each day as if it's your last.
Bernard B. Kerik
#86. 9/11 forced us to build another identity, to look deep and say who are we and what do we believe and is killing in the name of Islam part of that religion?
No. No. No.
Ruth Ahmed
#87. The tragedy of 9/11 galvanised the American superpower into action, leaving us in Europe divided in its wake.
Douglas Hurd
#88. After 9/11, I was like many people in New York City and got a little depressed. I began to check myself into The Waldorf Astoria for room service, movies and just to chill. I wanted to contribute to the great city of Manhattan.
Kristin Chenoweth
#89. Our pre-9/11 gun laws allow our enemies in the War on Terror to arm themselves right here in our own country.
Carolyn McCarthy
#90. Many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview.
Karl Rove
#91. You know if I had nickel for every time Bush has mentioned 9/11, I could raise enough reward money to go after Bin Laden.
Jon Stewart
#92. Clearly, 9/11 would have to be some of the best work that I've done because I was working without a template, and that was very difficult. Having nearly been victimized by the north tower, it was difficult to remain composed and be informative.
Ashleigh Banfield
#93. I hope that 9/11 has grouped us as one, and in doing so it has united us. Perhaps as a unit we can help each other get ahead, survive and succeed in this free world. And hey guys, let's not forget out manners!!
Doug Davidson
#94. I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They'll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.
Tucker Elliot
#95. We didn't crumble after 9/11. We didn't falter after the Boston Marathon. But we're America. Americans will never, ever stand down. We endure. We overcome. We own the finish line.
Joe Biden
#96. I worked in the White House on 9/11, where the vice president was given the authority to, if he deemed necessary, shoot down an American passenger jet.
Nicolle Wallace
#97. I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.
Daniel Dennett
#98. To choose and be so adamant about this exact location just a block or two away from 9/11, again is that knife, it feels like.
Sarah Palin
#99. You can't accuse the creator of The Boondocks, ... Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil and the government is lying about 9/11.
Aaron McGruder
#100. I was in my office when - on 9/11. I think I had a number of meetings scheduled. I was just getting to know the bureau. And somebody walked in and said the first plane had - or a plane had struck the World Trade Center, one of the towers.
Robert Mueller
