9 11 Primary Sources Quotes

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed. ~ Bruce Feiler

One of the worst things we could do is start to act now as though the attack of 9/11 is a thing of the past and will never be repeated. That's just not true. ~ Dick Cheney

I have prayed with the families and wept at the funerals of Hoosiers who did not shrink from 9-11 but grew into heroes whose names will forever be engraved in the heart of a grateful nation. ~ Mike Pence

But the very fact that this process is unconscious gives us the reason why man has thought of everything except the psyche in his attempts to explain myths. He simply didn't know that the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths, and that our unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an inner drama which primitive man rediscovers, by means of analogy, in the processes of nature both great and small.11 [9] ~ C. G. Jung

In Korea I'd been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn't get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He'd come home, leave again, come home, leave again, until one day he came home a different person altogether. Sami lost Angel, lost her family, and then she lost herself. ~ Tucker Elliot

It wasn't you, it wasn't me,
Up there, two thousand feet above
A New York street. We're safe and free,
A little while, to live and love,

Imagining what might have been –
The phone-call from the blazing tower,
A last farewell on the machine,
While someone sleeps another hour,

Or worse, perhaps, to say goodbye
And listen to each other's pain,
Send helpless love across the sky,
Knowing we'll never meet again,

Or jump together, hand in hand,
To certain death. Spared all of this
For now, how well I understand
That love is all, is all there is. ~ Wendy Cope

Six months after 9/11, Jean-Marie Le Pen was almost elected president of France. There were a number of leaders and a number of parties running in the French national elections that year in the spring of 2002. But it ended up being not just a shock across France, and not just a shock across Europe. But it ended up being almost a worldwide shock when in the spring of 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in those national elections. That put him in a two-man runoff for the presidency of France, spring of 2002. ~ Rachel Maddow

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

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?

4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.

5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.

6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.

7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
"See, this is new"?
It has been already
in the ages before us.

11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after. ~ Anonymous

More people died on 9/11, in one day, at the hand of Muslim terrorists than during the Inquisition. ~ Robert Jeffress

Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down. ~ Max Brooks

I'd see the arrow. I'd think about attitude and perception. Maybe the green arrow on the ceiling is to Muslims as the KJV in the Motel 6 nightstand is to Christians. ~ Tucker Elliot

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

I think within a year or so, perhaps, if 9/11 had not happened, in Afghanistan would have been a very broad-based general uprising against the Taliban. ~ Ahmed Rashid

If everybody in the world suddenly decided not to use their credit cards for three days, the whole global economy would be in serious trouble. (Recall how we were all urged to get out our credit cards after 9/11 and get back to shopping.) Which is why so much effort is put toward getting money out of our pockets and keeping it circulating. ~ David Harvey

The records available for the phone calls from American 77 do not allow for a determination of which of four 'connected calls to unknown numbers' represent the two between Barbara and Ted Olson. ~ National Commission On Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States

Right, oh, yeah, Happy 9/11! Celebrate the day, right? ~ James Brolin

When I look at the world, I recognize that unfortunately, it sometimes takes an atrocity like 9/11 to force us to come together. ~ Ving Rhames

I can see the driver as if I'm looking at him through binoculars, bending to adjust the volume on his radio, eyes wide at what he hears, which I can't understand because when he hits you there is only silence. My feet, pounding through the grass, make no sound. I know that my mouth is open, that air is rushing across my stretched vocal chords, but I hear nothing. You lift into the air and the car is past before you land silently at my feet, as if something as small as you couldn't possibly make a sound in a world where buildings can come down. ~ Philip Beard

Home. It's where we come from. Who we are. ~ Jewell Parker Rhodes

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

Since 9/11, the U.S.A. Patriot Act has torn down the invisible wall that was perceived as preventing the FBI and CIA from sharing information. ~ Ronald Kessler

Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books. ~ Hemant Mehta

When 9/11 happened, 12 of our neighborhood firemen were killed. I looked around at the country that had adopted me and I became an American. ~ Iman Abdulmajid

New York is not the centre for American culture and art that it once was because of the forces of conservatism. Giuliani, capitalism - and then there was 9/11. I really believe that if I leave, it will suffer! Maybe that's why I love it here, because I feel wanted. ~ Rufus Wainwright

You know where the people who killed people in San Bernardino came from. You know where people who did 9/11 came from. You know where the people who did Paris came from, where they transited, where they went. None of them even set foot in Iran. So why are you punishing people who are visiting Iran for that? ... We're not going to radicalize them. We never have. Your allies have radicalized people who visited. ~ Mohammad Javad Zarif

Most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work. But more than anything, because linking sources is such an easy thing to do, and the motivations for avoiding links are so dubious, I've detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don't link to primary sources, I just don't trust you. ~ Ben Goldacre

Death by plane crash scares me. I travel a lot, and when you hit turbulence, and post 9/11, that's in the back of my mind a bit. ~ Robert Englund

The following brief points are like magic moccasins. They
guarantee safe guidance through the forest of people. To walk
safely, wear them!
1. The most persuasive power you have toward others is a
mature self.
2. The mark of greatness is to be superior without feeling
superior.
3. "The consciousness of being loved softens the keenest
pang." (Joseph Addison)
4. The turning point in all your exterior relations comes
when you start changing your inner self.
5. Strong people attract the weak.
6. Possessiveness and dependency are not states of love.
7. Your own level of being attracts the kind of people who
enter your life.
8. "He is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey
nor command in order to be something." (Goethe)
9. Your True Self cannot be afraid of anyone.
10. You break the cord of painful thought toward another
person by snipping the connection within your own
mind.
11. It is very painful to pretend to be someone.
12. Any sincere effort at bettering your human relations
returns a reward.
13. Don't drain your energy by thinking negatively toward
people who harm you.
14. You get along with others to the exact degree that you
get along with yourself.
15. A real person stands out like a human being among statues. ~ Vernon Howard

Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo. ~ Pankaj Mishra

And then, on September 11, the world fractured.
It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow
the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction. ~ Barack Obama

My dad died in 9/11. They opened up the museum to families today, so I went this morning. My plan was to go to work after, but I just couldn't do it.""What happened to him?""He was a cop. He actually had the day off. But as soon as he heard, he drove into the city and got there just in time for the second tower to fall. A witness said that my dad had started to run when the tower fell, but turned back because a trapped woman was calling to him.""What do you remember?""I was in science class. And my teacher told us that there had been a plane crash. That's all she said. Then I noticed all these kids around me getting phone calls and text messages, and they'd run out of class. So I knew something big was happening. Soon we got let out of school. On the ride home, I remember thinking that my dad was going to be working overtime on this. I imagined he'd be down there everyday, saving people. 'I bet I won't see him for weeks,' I said. ~ Brandon Stanton

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

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...), is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party, and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States…
And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalen ~ Christopher Hitchens

The fact that the CIA knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers were entering the United States and didn't notify the FBI and that nobody lost their job is shocking. Instead, we occupied Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. I mean, how did those choices get made? ~ Laura Poitras

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

There's only three things he mentions in a sentence
a noun, a verb, and 9/11. ~ Joe Biden

WikiLeaks is the 9/11 of diplomacy. ~ Franco Frattini

I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn't look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there's only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research. ~ Aaron Eckhart

If the U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, they cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. On 9/11/2001, Americans noticed that payback can be a real motherfucker. ~ Ward Churchill

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

So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year - meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11's casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the "war on terror.") ~ Rebecca Solnit

1) Temperance ... drink not to elevation. (2) Silence ... avoid trifling conversations. (3) Order: Let all your things have their places ... (4) Resolution ... perform without fail what you resolve. (5) Frugality ... i.e. waste nothing. (6) Industry: Lose no time; be always employ'd ... (7) Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently ... (8) Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries ... (9) Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting ... (10) Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body ... (11) Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles ... (12) Chastity (13) Humility : Imitate Jesus ... ~ Benjamin Franklin

We've got a daunting enough task to provide a definitive account of what happened in 9/11, without fear or favor, something that will last and will survive criticism over time. And we think we can do that with integrity in a bipartisan report. ~ Richard Ben-Veniste

After the 9/11 attacks, I dutifully stocked up on rolls of duct tape and N-95 masks, as the government recommended. ~ Dana Milbank

The music industry's actions at the time of 9/11 and since have been actions driven by patriotism in most instances, and greed and stupidity to a lesser degree. Sounds like real life doesn't it? ~ Ronnie James Dio