Syrian Quotes

#1. The best-armed and best-trained divisions of the Syrian army are Alawite.

Elliott Abrams

#2. I cannot either change or do anything bad or good to the Syrian people and Syrian citizens.

Najib Mikati

#3. I have great respect for the Syrian people, as I do for the rest of the Middle East.

Steven Magee

#4. This Syrian circus/crisis we are going through is hilarious ... It's like watching some thug killing another person and asking him for his bullets but releasing him free.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#5. How often have I held back my complaint: Why should the Lebanese homeland be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Egyptian loaf be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Syrian roof be incompatible with Palestine? Why should Palestine be incompatible with Palestine?

Mahmoud Darwish

#6. I never threatened him and no Syrian intelligence officer has ever pointed a gun to his head.

Rafik Hariri

#7. How long do Syrian families have to live in fear that their children will be killed or tortured, before the Security Council will act? How many people need to die before the consciences of world capitals are stirred?

William Hague

#8. Those who back the Syrian regime from now on will find themselves in an even more isolated and indefensible minority.

William Hague

#9. ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.

Richard Engel

#10. Not all G8 members take the view that chemical weapons were in fact used by the Syrian Army. Some actually agree with us that there is no proof.

Vladimir Putin

#11. 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

#12. The Syrian border town of Qa'im was the main gateway Islamic radicals used to go to Iraq. Syria became the passageway for extremists from Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to fight a jihad against American forces in Iraq.

Richard Engel

#13. We all have to announce our full solidarity with the struggle of those seeking freedom and justice in Syria, and translate this sympathy into a clear political vision that supports a peaceful transition to a democratic system of rule that reflects the demands of the Syrian people for freedom.

Mohammed Morsi

#14. You cannot defeat Islamic State with airstrikes only. It's necessary to cooperate with ground troops, and the Syrian army is the most efficient and powerful ground force to fight the Islamic State.

Sergei Lavrov

#15. The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel--happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, resentful to pay taxes. The left sees prejudice.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#16. Syrian refugees might be Isis, they may be the great Trojan horse of all time.

Donald Trump

#17. I kept seeing turning points. First the uprising. Then the creation of the Free Syrian Army, the FSA. Now a big assassination bombing in the heart of Assad's government. But the turn never came. It just got worse and worse.

Richard Engel

#18. We have evidence that a number of Bahrainis who oppose our government are being trained in Syria. I have seen the files and we have notified the Syrian authorities, but they deny any involvement.

Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa

#19. 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

#20. Syrian refugees are Trojan horses.

Donald Trump

#21. A strategy would be how do we mobilize support for the remnants of the Syrian Free Army, and it might require combat troops to inspire an international effort.

Jeb Bush

#22. According to the international organization for migration, more than 1 million migrants have arrived in Europe this year, the most since World War II. Half of them were Syrian.

Lawrence O'Donnell

#23. Personally, I do not support the concept of suicide bombings. This is not part of our [syrian] culture. But whether you condemn them or not, suicide bombings are a reality.

Bashar Al-Assad

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

Walid Jumblatt

#25. The challenge there is that ISIL doesn't have an air force. So the damage done there is not against ISIL. It's against the Syrian regime.

Barack Obama

#26. This Lord of natures today was transformed contrary to His nature;
it is not too difficult for us to also overthrow our evil will. Hymns of the Nativity, Hymn 1:97, pg. 74 in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989).

Ephrem The Syrian

#27. We are not directly involved in Syria. But we will be working with our partners in the European Union and at the United Nations to see if we can persuade the Syrian authorities to go, as I say, more in that direction of respect for democracy and human rights.

William Hague

#28. Our priority is to go after ISIL. And so what we have said is that we are not engaging in a military action against the Syrian regime. We are going after ISIL facilities and personnel who are using Syria as a safe haven, in service of our strategy in Iraq.

Barack Obama

#29. If we have the kinds of confirmation that we need, we will once again work with the international community and the organization charged with monitoring compliance by the Syrian government, and we will reach out to patrons of Assad like Russia to put a stop to it.

Barack Obama

#30. When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite.

Edward Gibbon

#31. We could have made peace with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad a long time ago. It didn't happen, because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't want to give up the Golan (Heights).

Tom Segev

#32. It has a Nazi echo, doesn't it? The Jews had to wear that Star of David, and Donald Trump is saying all Syrians have to carry an ID card and they can, without warrant, go into any Syrian's home or a mosque.

George Takei

#33. I wish - I wish the peace and good for the Syrian citizen and the Syrian regime.

Najib Mikati

#34. In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

Elliott Colla

#35. If you get the U.N. to say we're going to solve the Syrian problem, if you get the Russians involved in a productive posture, you are making progress, but the Republican core says no strategy or failed strategy.

Juan Williams

#36. In 2013 we had never faced a crisis like the Syrian refugee crisis now. Up until that point, a refugee meant someone fleeing oppression, fleeing Communism like it is in my community.

Marco Rubio

#37. Syrian influence has not ended yet. It is going to be a very long path.

Walid Jumblatt

#38. There are so many people in pain because of the Syrian conflict. Ten million trying to live in camps that are barely set up for three.

Chad Urmston

#39. The struggle against terrorists in the territory of Syria should be structured in cooperation with the Syrian government, which clearly stated its readiness to join it.

Sergei Lavrov

#40. The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez's interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar.

Robert Fisk

#41. If President Obama really wants to hurt the Syrian government, don't send cruise missiles. He should send over some of his economic advisers.

Jay Leno

#42. ISIS already has strongholds in Syria, while the Free Syrian Army desperately needs more U.S. assistance.

John Barrasso

#43. Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.

Isaac Mizrahi

#44. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno.

Walter Isaacson

#45. There is a positive and personal relationship between the Egyptian people and the Syrian people.

Mohammed Morsi

#46. I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees.

Malala Yousafzai

#47. 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

#48. No, no, I know, it's just - you know, I thought ... " "Because I have Syrian heritage I hate the Jews?" "When you put it like that, I'm pretty sure I'm a dumb-ass.

Chuck Wendig

#49. I said, we should allow no Syrian refugees into the country, not even women or children.

Lawrence O'Donnell

#50. I know something quite sure. We'll never have peace with this Syrian regime. They'll never give us relief, and we'll never forget that.

Walid Jumblatt

#51. A majority of the Syrian people believe in the regime and support Bashar al-Assad.

Hassan Nasrallah

#52. The fall of the Syrian regime is in the interest of America and Israel.

Hassan Nasrallah

#53. He has made peace with himself, as Isaac the Syrian says, and heaven and earth have made peace with him. He is gathering the fruit of humility. But this takes place only on the narrow way, and few there be that find it.

Tito Colliander

#54. The Syrian army is tired of corruption. It is tired of party nepotism. It is becoming very angry with those it blames for the war.

Robert Fisk

#55. 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

#56. The courage of the Syrian protesters is remarkable, for they face prison, torture, or death every time they lift a banner.

Elliott Abrams

#57. I believe the United States should make the protection of Syrian civilians from war crimes and crimes against humanity a higher priority.

Bob Casey Jr.

#58. Vice-President Ford, possibly preparing for higher duties, assessed Kissinger's part in the Syrian-Israeli troop disengagement as the great diplomatic triumph of this century or perhaps any other.

Edwin Newman

#59. I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU's reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime.

Timothy Garton Ash

#60. 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

#61. The Syrian regime is helping the insurgency in Iraq and allowing all kinds of militants to come in and out, and go to Iraq to attack random soldiers and innocent people.

Walid Jumblatt

#62. He spent more time on the road to Damascus than a Syrian camel driver. And we thought nobody could fill John Kerry's flip-flops! ... [Romney's record was] "anything but conservative until he changed all the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for President."

Mike Huckabee

#63. Turkey wants to see Bashar al-Assad go and wants to kind of expand its sphere of influence into Turkey so its Ottoman glory or Ottoman past are once again project into the Syrian provinces. That's kind of what Turkey's vision is.

Richard Engel

#64. Under Syrian law, a journalist is not allowed to report on military matters. This may be wrong or right, but that's just the way it is.

Bashar Al-Assad

#65. The Syrian civil war is a "crime initiated by the United States and the Zionist regime, Israel."

Ali Khamenei

#66. In fact, in Indiana we suspended the Syrian refugee program in the wake of the terrorist attack. We have no higher priority than the safety and security of the people of this country, and Donald Trump is right to articulate that view.

Mike Pence

#67. The appalling crackdown that we witnessed in Hama and other Syrian cities on 30 and 31 July only erode the regime's legitimacy and increase resentment. In the absence of an end to the senseless violence and a genuine process of political reform, we will continue to pursue further EU sanctions.

William Hague

#68. No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.

Vladimir Putin

#69. If I have any advice to give to the Syrian president it is to cooperate for the sake of the investigation or for the sake of uncovering the truth.

Walid Jumblatt

#70. the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria - at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is capable of anything.

Richard Engel

#71. The transition from tyranny to democracy is very hard. The Syrian people have to handle this in a way that works in Syria. And the brutality of the Assad regime is unacceptable.

Jacob Lew

#72. Nobody wants anybody who's radical, who wants to move in here to be able to gain access. I said we should take a pause on these Syrian migrants. And I believe we should do that.

John Kasich

#73. I've been calling for the support of the Syrian rebels for years.

John Barrasso

#74. Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.

Mark Twain

#75. Moscow and Washington have evolved a delicate process for 'de-confliction' in the tight Syrian airspace, where accidents or miscommunication could be disastrous.

David Ignatius

#76. If you ever go to any event ever, for any reason, they will give you a tote bag. Medical conference? Tote bag. Wedding? Tote bag. Syrian refugee arriving in Canada? Maple leaf tote bag. My orthodontist gave me a tote bag. And a t-shirt. Which I put in the tote bag.

Jennifer McCartney

#77. God willing, we shall come to a stage where the world looks at the Palestinian question, and Palestinian rights on Palestinian national soil, as well as the questions of the occupied Syrian and Lebanese territories. These are the bases on which peace will be built.

King Hussein I

#78. President [Barack] Obama and Hillary Clinton are proposing bringing tens of thousands of Syrian refugees to this country when the head of the FBI has told Congress they cannot vet those refugees.

Ted Cruz

#79. No one doubts that innocent men, women and children have been the victims of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. And there's no doubt who is responsible for this heinous use of chemical weapons in Syria: the Syrian regime.

Joe Biden

#80. Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.

Luke Harding

#81. I explained that we would like to adjust our position on the Syrian question to theirs, as, in our view, they are the decisive factor in our relations with our neighbors, and Syria is unimportant.

Moshe Sharett

#82. Australia would play its role in taking displaced people from the Syrian conflict.

Tony Abbott

#83. Israel bombed the Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. What the Syrians did in response, nothing. Israel has killed a number of terrorist leaders in Syria. Response? Nothing.

Elliott Abrams

#84. When I visited Syrian special forces along the front lines, I was given extraordinary amounts of detail. They gave me the code numbers for the various positions they've got, told me where the rebels were - about 800 meters away in a forest. I met soldiers who had been wounded but were still serving.

Robert Fisk

#85. We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

Nicholas Kristof

#86. I am Syrian, I was made in Syria, I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.

Bashar Al-Assad

#87. Be a lamp in brightness, and make the works of darkness cease, so that whenever your doctrine shines, no one may dare to heed the desires of darkness.

Ephrem The Syrian

#88. It is blasphemy if you pray before God while you are full of anger.

Ephrem The Syrian

#89. Blessed the one who loves truth continually and has not lent his mouth as an instrument of impiety by lying, for he fears the commandment about idle speech.

Ephrem The Syrian

#90. With war, most people are heartless and less weighed as a ton of nothing.

Auliq Ice

#91. Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches.

Simran Keshwani

#92. Whoever fears God stands above all manner of fear. He has become a stranger to all the fear of this world and placed it far from himself, and no manner of trembling comes near him.

Ephrem The Syrian

#93. Not only men, but also women, the weaker sex, in going by the narrow path of Christ have received for themselves the Kingdom of Heaven. For there is neither male nor female, but everyone receives his own reward according to his own labor.

Ephrem The Syrian

#94. Don't let your eyes look here and there, and don't look on someone elses' beauty, so that the devil will not conquer you with the help of your eyes.

Ephrem The Syrian

#95. I was against the Iraq war I was against the Afghan war I was against bombing Libya and Syria but to be quite honest and with a heavy heart because more innocent people are gonna be killed....We have to step in and help wipeout ISIS!

Cal Sarwar

#96. It's bewildering to me how you can just start chatting with a complete stranger on Facebook, and - next thing you know - it seems as if there's some intense connection with the person - or at least you feel that closeness and hope it's mutual

Zack Love

#97. Blessed the one who has become a good spiritual net and caught many for the good Lord, such a one will greatly praised by the Lord.

Ephrem The Syrian

#98. It's when the 'international community' expresses 'concern' about your 'situation' that your situation is well and truly fucked.

Michael D. Weiss

#99. Blessed the one who continually humbles himself willingly; he will be crowned by the One who willingly humbled himself for our sake.

Ephrem The Syrian

#100. O Lord, we cannot go to the pool of Siloe to which you sent the blind man. But we have the chalice of Your Precious Blood, filled with life and light. The purer we are, the more we receive.

Ephrem The Syrian