Top 100 Quotes About Middle East
#1. On Easter, the Pope asked for peace in the Middle East. There are two groups the Pope has to contend with - Jewish people and Muslims. They couldn't wait to hear his suggestions.
Conan O'Brien
#2. Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.
Zaha Hadid
#3. Palestinian guerrillas, in a bold and coordinated action, created this newest crisis Sunday, and in doing so they accomplished what they set out to do: they thrust back into the world's attention a problem diplomats have tended to shunt aside in hesitant steps towards Middle East peace.
Kai Bird
#4. 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
#5. Peace in the Middle East isn't going to be created by another war or violent act on the other side.
Mandy Patinkin
#6. 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
#7. I believe the democratic transformation in Iraq will lead to change in Middle East.
Jalal Talabani
#8. Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.
Shimon Peres
#9. When you look at - when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they're not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.
Richard Engel
#10. I have great respect for the Syrian people, as I do for the rest of the Middle East.
Steven Magee
#11. All necessary measures should be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale. - joint statement signed by both Chaim Weizmann and Prince Faisal
Sol Stern
#12. Contrary to popular view, I've never been patronized in the Middle East. Men maybe treat women differently, but they do not treat them with disrespect. They don't hate women. It's a very different kind of mentality.
Zaha Hadid
#13. Although most Americans don't know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East.
Jeff Goodell
#14. Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East ... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled ... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins.
George W. Bush
#15. We don't want to have a child that has many illnesses, and that will pass away after a few months. A child must have a good environment, and parents that will take care of it.
[...] It [a Kurdish state] must be a part of stability in this area.
Fuad Hussein
#16. Israelis are a mix of North African, Levantine, and Eastern European, which inflames the politics but does amazing things for the women.
Kenneth Cain
#17. I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.
Peter Landesman
#18. I'm worried about people who say Bush is lying. It's much more frightening that he's not lying, that he believes what he believes: that it's his mission to change the Middle East into a democracy. That's more unnerving.
Seymour Hersh
#19. I often ask myself, 'Why is it that most of the lies come out of Islamic countries, and why is it that most of the social corruptions are in the Middle East and in these Islamic countries?' The answer is, when you control something, when you suppress something, people try to do it another way.
Bahman Ghobadi
#20. So they caught Gadhafi in a storm sewer and shot him. Or as they call it in the Middle East, an orderly transfer of power.
David Letterman
#21. Iran has, by virtue of its growth and by virtue of the United States' mistakes in Iraq, tilted the balance of power in the Middle East. That is the case, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a threat.
Trita Parsi
#22. He tried to recall the look of her eyes the day they first met. He closed his eyes and concentrated, but as he envisioned Kalila's car passing by, he couldn't decide if it was a memory or a dream.
Christian F. Burton
#23. We want to be, I think, an example for the rest of the Arab world, because there are a lot of people who say that the only democracy you can have in the Middle East is the Muslim Brotherhood.
Abdallah II Of Jordan
#24. The Middle East is now filled with death and destruction and that was the aim of Neo-Conservatives who planned this destruction of seven Muslim nations in five years and they are on schedule and the final nation in their sights to destroy is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Louis Farrakhan
#25. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.
Edward W. Said
#26. Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#27. The Middle East Media Research Institute has spent decades detailing the diseased messages emanating from Palestinian TV and textbooks, instructing children in the glories of suicide terrorism against innocent Israelis.
John Podhoretz
#28. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.
Barack Obama
#29. Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became 'pro'-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.
Norman Finkelstein
#30. As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.
Neil MacGregor
#31. And the Middle East, well, I think we can all see what we've made there. What a hand we've had in the making of our own demise. How masterful. And the world will continue to be melted by a sun we've crossed terribly with our progress.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#32. Iraq is a very important part of securing the homeland, and its a very important part of helping change the Middle East into a part of the world that will not serve as a threat to the civilized world, to people like
or to the developed world, to people like
in the United States.
George W. Bush
#33. Now the question is, now that we are there, what should we do in the best interest of the U.S., not only from a standpoint of the necessity of some stable democracy in the Middle East ...
Mike Huckabee
#34. I grew up spending time at my grandmother's farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle.
Matthea Harvey
#35. The Middle East is America's 'champagne room'. No matter how much you spend, you will still never get what you want.
Dov Davidoff
#36. Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength.
Meir Kahane
#37. Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East.
Tom Robbins
#38. The CIA was always looking to tie every kind of criminal activity in the Middle East to al Qaeda.
Kenneth Eade
#39. Those looking from Europe see Turkey as an economic success, whereas others from the Middle East see Turkey as a democratic success.
Ali Babacan
#40. Similarly, it is argued that the culture of Islam is incompatible with democracy. Basically, this conventional perspective of the Middle East thus contends that democracy in that region is neither possible nor even desirable.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#41. The question of modernization is central to disturbances in the Middle East and in Africa. Everyone is after modernization, no matter where they come from. But you have to be careful about it, and more importantly, you have to have sense about it.
Youssou N'Dour
#42. Human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East.
Dalia Mogahed
#43. I think that we have to be very careful about who comes here from the Middle East.
Rand Paul
#44. Christianity was literally born in the Middle East, and we must not forget our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters in Christ.
Prince Charles
#45. The Israeli regime is a tool in the hands of Zionists to control the Middle-East and the entire world.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
#46. Democracy isn't just for people in the Middle East, but Britons, too.
Heather Brooke
#47. We thank you [the soldiers recently returned from the middle east] for your service.
Garrison Keillor
#48. Integrationists are delighted to live in a democratic country where the rule of law prevails, whereas chauvinists wish to import the customs of the Middle East and South Asia.
Daniel Pipes
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Religious distinctions are deeply important for many of the problems in today's Middle East, particularly between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Syria and Iraq.
Max Fisher
#52. I don't think it's possible to skip with a frown on your face ... I'd like to see the world's governing and terrorist leaders on a skipping tour through the Middle East and across the subcontinent and China to Korea.
Bindi Irwin
#53. We have lost a lot of ground to the extremists in the Middle East.
Najib Razak
#54. It is unrealistic to imagine a US geostrategic vision which sees its pivotal interests linked exclusively to the Pacific region. More appropriately, we need to consider the wider Middle East, Central Asia and North-East Africa to be bound together in a geopolitical unit of pivotal importance.
Nayef Al-Rodhan
#55. The long conflict between Israel and Palestine has, for better or worse, become the world's conflict. It permanently destabilizes the Middle East, blocks the settlement of urgent crises, and intensifies looming threats to the West.
Stephen Kinzer
#56. What type of car do I get?" David asked.
"As we like to say in the Middle East," Zalinsky said, "We'll blow up that bridge when we get to it.
Joel C. Rosenberg
#57. King Abdullah has died. A divisive figure in the Middle East. The sad irony is that the USA preached democracy in the face of absolute rule.
Immortal Technique
#58. Egypt is the most populous Arab nation, the seat of Sunni Islamic doctrine, and has tremendous political, religious and social influence on the rest of the region. For better or worse, it will lead the rest of the Middle East by example. So goes Egypt, so goes the region.
Richard Engel
#59. Philanthropy, although it's tiny compared to the government, it's 2% of the US economy, which is the largest percentage, other than the Middle East.
Bill Gates
#60. The European Tour plays all over the world: from the U.K. to China, from Korea to South Africa, and from the Middle East to southeast Asia.
Peter Uihlein
#61. Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.
Paul Krugman
#62. According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#63. The cost of war is like an immeasurable tremor that knows no borders, its shockwaves reverberating across the world resulting in universal suffering.
Aysha Taryam
#64. In the Middle East, the conflict today is a matter of generations and not of cultures.
Shimon Peres
#65. If you compare the size of our reserves of Saudi Arabia and the whole Middle East, it's like three times as much as all of that combined and that's just the easily, readily available 1800 billion barrels and there are probably 3 billion barrels that are commercially just under that, available.
Chris Cannon
#66. I think too many of my Republican friends are into perpetual warfare in the Middle East. And that scares the bejesus out of me.
Bernie Sanders
#67. I imagine, like all his predecessors, Barak Obama would like to achieve greatness in bringing peace in the Middle East. I hope it will not be at the expense of Israel.
Elie Wiesel
#68. It is alarming ... to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience.
Winston Churchill
#69. The truth is, about the Middle East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa.
Wesley Clark
#70. Their plan is to return the entire world - not just the Middle East - to the days of the caliphate and either convert all of us so-called infidels into born-again Islamic believers or kill us.
David Hackworth
#71. The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghanistan. There are millions of stories out there, millions of potential Booksellers of Kabul or Valentino Achak Dengs.
Annia Ciezadlo
#72. Although failure is a great teacher, we cannot afford the time to learn from our failures. Human societies cannot be subjected to such a process.
Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum
#73. We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we've done a tremendous disservice to humanity.
Donald Trump
#74. George Bush didn't campaign on, 'If you elect me, I'm going to be a great president to confront terrorism and launch a war in the Middle East' because nobody was thinking about it in the year 2000. But it became the defining issue of his presidency.
Mike Huckabee
#75. We have to fight radical Islam wherever it exists. It's in Afghanistan, it's in Saudi Arabia, throughout the Middle-East in big numbers and it's in the United States.
Tom Tancredo
#76. That there are limitations to the Jewish response of humor when Jews today face murderous, humorless terrorists in the Middle East or the cowardly politicians of Europe seeking the votes of their increasingly Muslim electorates.
Joseph Epstein
#77. Jews know the Palestinians. And they know they're not really different. And they know they are from the same background. And they know if they coordinated that they could be an economic success and a real basis for a rebirth in the Middle East.
Russ Feingold
#78. Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don't bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don't rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?
Rabih Alameddine
#79. The doctrine that everything is fine as long as the population is quiet, that applies in the Middle East, applies in Central America, it applies in the United States.
Noam Chomsky
#81. Investment in education and economic prosperity is the best way to cure fanaticism and for establishing a just peace in the Middle East.
Ahmed Zewail
#82. There are a lot of people in Beverly Hills who come from the Middle East, who are very much a part of the Beverly Hills fabric, and their kids grew up with the privileges of Beverly Hills. And yet they still have to deal with a lot of the prejudice against them for being foreign-born.
Amy Heckerling
#83. We have already provided a strong humanitarian response to the problems in the Middle East and that response will be stronger within coming days.
Tony Abbott
#84. I think Syria is in a particularly sensitive geopolitical position in terms of the politics of the Middle East.
Edward Luck
#85. Part of the problem that we have currently in the Middle East is that[Bashar] Assad has hung on to power with the very strong support of Russia and Iran and with the proxy of Hezbollah being there basically fighting his battles.
Hillary Clinton
#86. I was against it [war in Middle East]. And I was against it very early. And we shouldn't have been in there. And I think it is probably perhaps the worst mistake we have ever made. First of all, they didn't knock down the World Trade Center, OK? It wasn't Iraq. It was other people.
Donald Trump
#87. This past year has been very turbulent for the Middle East, and my conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu strengthened my belief that we need to remain vigilant in our support of our critical ally.
Rob Portman
#88. These are all elements, but the main thing we can do in the Middle East is encourage the reformist elements.
Frank Carlucci
#89. The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.
John Keegan
#90. U.K. citizens fleeing the Middle East and Japan have been allowed to take their animal companions with them on evacuation flights. The U.S. is not so civilized, and that's a blot on our national copybook.
Ingrid Newkirk
#91. For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.
George W. Bush
#92. In the Middle East there are two kinds of regimes - those that could be worse, and those that couldn't be worse.
Bret Stephens
#94. Everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, but no one is talking about it. The world doesn't want nuclear weapons - not in Israel, not in the Middle East and not anywhere in the world.
Mordechai Vanunu
#95. One of my problems, so to speak, is that, in America, we tend to think in relatively short-term. In the Middle East and Asia and other parts of the world, they think in terms of centuries or 500 years or 1,000 years.
Jay Rockefeller
#96. 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
#97. I think a lot it was the theology, that the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad, that somehow if we broke apart the rejectionist states, like Iraq, then the whole Middle East would reconfigure itself into a more favorable environment for democracy and Israel and us.
Chris Matthews
#98. Many analysts compare Turkey with countries in the Middle East, but I think we need to compare it with Russia. Both countries come from a tradition of empire, and also from a tradition of the strong state.
Elif Safak
#99. Without action, we are going to continue to allow Iran to be a safe harbor for terrorists, see its economy further deteriorate, and see the Middle East further destabilize.
Russ Carnahan
#100. The only pool of young people lies in Saudi Arabia, some of the Middle-East countries, and few African countries. But they are not prepared as Indians are ... we travel well; we are accepted globally very well, and that makes India truly a place to source world's workforce.
Sunil Mittal
