Robert Fisk Quotes

After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career - in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad - watching the people within those borders burn. ~ Robert Fisk

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

I do not make stories up, full stop. ~ Robert Fisk

Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist. ~ Robert Fisk

Individuals in various countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia listen to the tapes of bin Laden. They gather in groups of four or five. They feel they want to do something to express their support for what they've heard. The idea that they were taking orders is a particularly Western idea. ~ Robert Fisk

Some of the guys in the Northern Alliance are war criminals. One of the Northern Alliance commanders ran a slave girl network in Kabul in 1994. Remember that there was a period when every woman on the streets was at risk of being raped. This was the Northern Alliance period of glory. ~ Robert Fisk

No militia or political leader is so powerful - his name never so influential - as when he is dead, enshrined on wall posters and gateposts amid naively painted clusters of tulips and roses, the final artistic accolade of every armed martyr in Lebanon. ~ Robert Fisk

It was, I think in retrospect, the most dramatic individual personal act I have ever seen a soldier take. The mighty powers may try to cover up, but the little people can still sometimes win. ~ Robert Fisk

Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy. ~ Robert Fisk

Saudi Arabia is the most fragile of all Arab states, though we're not saying so. And, unfortunately, bin Laden puts his finger on the other longstanding injustices in the Arab world: the continued occupation of Palestinian land by the Israelis; the enormous, constant Arab anger with the tens of thousands of Iraqi children who are dying under sanctions; the feelings of humiliation of millions of Arabs living under petty dictators, almost all of whom are propped up by the West. ~ Robert Fisk

When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States? Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden. ~ Robert Fisk

One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to. ~ Robert Fisk

President Bush will come here and there will be new 'friends' of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who 'liberated' them. ~ Robert Fisk

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

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

The word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria. ~ Robert Fisk

The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said. ~ Robert Fisk

The [Israelis] believed - they were possessed of an absolute certainty and conviction - that 'terrorists' were in Chatila. How could I explain to them that the terrorists had left, that the terrorists had worn Israeli uniforms, that the terrorists had been sent into Chatila by Israeli officers, that the victims of the terrorists were not Israelis but Palestinians and Lebanese? ~ Robert Fisk

A businessman admits that he 'let go' an employee because he was a Sunni Muslim. You simply have to look after yourself, he explains. I am shocked, like a good Westerner should be. ~ Robert Fisk

American power in the Middle East is collapsing. It doesn't need much more than a shove, and it will - and that's not going to be a good thing. ~ Robert Fisk

When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself. ~ Robert Fisk

Why is it that we go to immense lengths getting the Serbs who were responsible for the massacre of 7,000 at Srbrenica - that's slightly more than the total figure for New York - and we take them to a tribunal in The Hague, and one after another, we arraign them, try them, convict them, and punish them in front of the world, but no plans have been brought forward to get bin Laden and his friends and put them on trial? ~ Robert Fisk

Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists. ~ Robert Fisk

The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel. ~ Robert Fisk

Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too? ~ Robert Fisk

It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers. ~ Robert Fisk

The bin Laden I met each time was in a simple Saudi white robe, with a simple, cheap kafiya and very cheap plastic sandals. But a videotape released before September 11, which I saw on Lebanese television, had him in a gold embroidered robe. When I saw this, I thought, whoa, has this guy changed? I wouldn't have imagined him ever appearing in such golden robes when I met him. ~ Robert Fisk

People turn to violence, because they have no other avenue left. ~ Robert Fisk

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon's army
circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and
Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up
checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese
Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops,
watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky
with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to
shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western
journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it
in Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the
back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry
and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a
hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every
alleyway, there were corpses - women, young men, babies
and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terrible
profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to
death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more
bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had
disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave.
Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves.
Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such
savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the
top of the tower block to the wes ~ Susan Abulhawa

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

When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity. ~ Robert Fisk

Obama, who is becoming more and more preacher-like, wants to be the Punisher-in-Chi ef of the Western World, the Avenger-in-Chie f. There is something oddly Roman about him ... The lesser races must be civilized and they must be punished ... Everyone outside the Roman Empire was called a barbarian. Everyone outside Obama's empire is called a terrorist. ~ Robert Fisk

It's very easy to start a war but the muftah, as the Arabs say, the key to switch off a war, is very difficult to find. ~ Robert Fisk

One of the comforts of firing a big gun during a siege must be the satisfaction of watching the results at long range. Inside a tank or behind an M107, a smudge of smoke against a building can be marked off against a map coordinate. The blood and shattered bones at the other end of the trajectory have no physical contact with the gun. But Randal and I were driving towards the other end of the trajectory, back to west Beirut, where the casualty statistics marked the other side of the concave mirror through which armies fight their wars. ~ Robert Fisk

Bin Laden was constantly revolving in his mind the fact that he had got rid of the Russians; therefore, the Americans can be got rid of, too. And where better than in the country where he knows how to fight? ~ Robert Fisk

Wasn't Saddam destroyed? Wasn't Gaddafi liquidated? Didn't Milosevic go to the Hague? All true. But Stalin survived. Kim Jong-un isn't doing too badly, either - though that's probably because he actually has nuclear weapons, as opposed to Iran which might or might not be trying to acquire them and thus remains on the Israeli-American target list. ~ Robert Fisk

There is nothing so satisfying as to be shot at without effect. ~ Robert Fisk

The cedars 'know the history of the earth better than history itself.' If this was so, it was little wonder that they had clung to life only here, up in these high altitudes where the mountains, ice and wind ensured that the Lebanese who so often took the name of the cedars in vain would rarely appear. ~ Robert Fisk

So here's a question from one who believed, only a week ago, that Baghdad might just collapse, that we might wake up one morning to find the Baathist militia and the Iraqi army gone and the Americans walking down Saadun Street with their rifles over their shoulders. If the Iraqis can still hold out against such overwhelming force in Umm Qasr for four days, if they can keep fighting in Basra and Nassariyeh the latter a city which briefly rose in successful revolt against Saddam in 1991 why should Saddam's forces not keep fighting in Baghdad? ~ Robert Fisk

I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other. ~ Robert Fisk

President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a 'world order' dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. ~ Robert Fisk

We live in a society in the West, where, when men do violent things, they do them under orders. They are soldiers carrying out orders or mafia men carrying out killings for bosses. But the way things happen in the Middle East is not the same as in the West. ~ Robert Fisk

At the end of the day, bin Laden's interest is not Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud. ~ Robert Fisk

In the long evenings in west Beirut, there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the french mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In the rusting front-door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? In the 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future? Did I witness the point of no return in 1976? That 12 year-old on the broken office chair in the ruins of the Beirut front line. Now he was in his mid-twenties - if he was still alive - a gunboy, no more. A gunman, no doubt ... ~ Robert Fisk

I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire. ~ Robert Fisk

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out. ~ Robert Fisk

And history s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence. ~ Robert Fisk

The Americans may think they have 'liberated' Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty - seem to have a different idea what liberation means. ~ Robert Fisk

There is a simple rule, anyone whose cellphone rings while I am speaking will be sold immediately into slavery ~ Robert Fisk

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. ~ Robert Fisk

Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute - an illusion of course, but that's what Assad thought. ~ Robert Fisk

In one way, I fear all Damascus is a dungeon. Or do you have to live here to appreciate that? ~ Robert Fisk

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.' ~ Robert Fisk

At Baalbek Nuts I bought pistachios from the Lebanese owners, who answered my request for their thoughts on the war with the typically Lebanese response of no problem. It's a lie, as we all knew. ~ Robert Fisk

To be social is to be forgiving. ~ Robert Frost

Hannah enjoyed watching as he read; she barely cared what it was she'd given him. Or maybe that wasn't true. She did care. But the way he held a book in his hands, and the frown of concentration on his brow, kindled love in her heart. She wanteed to stroke him as he read. The altering expressions on his face were like cloud shadows passing over a landscape. ~ Robert Hillman

This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It's as if we've learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in - and for what? ~ Robert Harris

I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

And style, by the way, is a very important thing. It is like your signature, your handwriting or it is something that you develop that is your way of presenting yourself and also your way of looking at what art - of how to make art. ~ Robert Barry

That we were slaves I had known all my life
and nothing could be done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold
but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

It is better to deserve without receiving than to receive without deserving ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter! ~ Robert Charles Wilson

And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance". However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally. ~ Robert Whitaker

I learned how difficult it is to be an artist. There are always compromises. The record company wants you to do this, your fans want you to do this, your family, you can't concentrate on your work. It's a hard thing to be an artist and not give up. That's why I have so much respect for people like Dylan and Neil Young and Tom Waits, because they keep at it. I have a new respect for a true artist. ~ Robert Hilburn

Why lie, Robert? Why lie? You know that lying is the alcoholics kryptonite, you can't afford it, the reasonable voice in his head screamed. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Oh, give us pleasure in the orch-ard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night. ~ Robert Frost

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society. ~ Robert Reich

If you want to save the planet, then stop reproducing and allow humanity to go extinct. Let the animals inherit the Earth, we're not worthy. ~ Robert M. Roberts

The sublime and yet softened beauty of the scenery around, had filled the soul of Stanton with delight, and he enjoyed that delight as Englishmen generally do, silently. ~ Charles Robert Maturin

The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Be very careful what you recommend to the president because he will do what you say. ~ Robert M. Gates

Therefore, what you do as a spiritual practitioner in this life shapes that. To seek and find this beautiful, continuing existence, where there can be more progress towards Buddha-hood, toward love, and wisdom, and helping all being etc. So that's the great value of it. ~ Robert Thurman

Honor does not have to be defended. ~ Robert J. Sawyer

Starting now and lasting until forever, your health and healthcare will be determined, to a remarkable and somewhat disquieting degree, by how well the technology works. ~ Robert Wachter

Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code. Bad schedules can be redone, bad requirements can be redefined. Bad team dynamics can be repaired. But bad code rots and ferments, becoming an inexorable weight that drags the team down. ~ Robert C. Martin

The printed page was like wine to me. ~ Robert E. Howard

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne. ~ Don DeLillo

Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

The Earth forgives the previous year every year. ~ Robert Hass

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks: What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion. ~ Robert Jastrow

Calm down please, sir, if you will,' said the bobby, still retaining a firm hold upon the horse's reins. ' "Stolen" is such an ugly word. It is not technically stealing if you are a British archaeologist and you acquire items of historical significance in the savage realms and liberate them to civilisation. ~ Robert Rankin

Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry ... makes people compete for the attention. ~ Robert Greene

Historically the first philosopher to enquire deeply into the nature of corruption in society was Ibn Khaldun (1322-1406), whose wandering life was largely spent in the northern littoral of Africa at a time when kingdoms and sultanates were crumbling. ~ Robert Payne

... Bear up until you see you're gaining. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

So, I soberly laid my last plan
To extinguish the man.
Round his creep-hole, with never a break
Ran my fires for his sake;
Over-head, did my thunder combine
With my under-ground mine:
Till I looked from my labour content
To enjoy the event. ~ Robert Browning

If you wanted to watch me work, it would be totally boring. It would look like a Warhol film where nothing happens. I sit for 24 hours, then I scratch myself. ~ Robert Irwin

Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there's more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles - some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as "divine" in some sense of the word? ~ Robert Wright

My belief in God is responsible for what I am ... How can I refuse to talk about something which is so much a prt of my life both as a man and as a actor? ~ Robert Vaughn

Every so often, it's time to make a change with a showrunner; you evaluate the creative and how the show is run, how the writing staff works. ~ Robert Greenblatt

There are no funny lawyers - only funny people who made a career mistake. ~ Robert J. White

I myself am hell;
nobody's here ~ Robert Lowell

Walk out of any doorway feel your way, feel your way like the day before Maybe you'll find direction around some corner where it's been waiting to meet you. ~ Robert Hunter

The final and only act of healing is to accept that there is nothing wrong with you. ~ Robert Holden

Many people confuse imagination with ingenuity, with inventiveness. But imagination is not this thing at all. It is the peculiar power of seeing with the eye of the mind. And it is the very essence of the theatre. ~ Robert Edmond Jones

Next thing you know, we're like the computer people for the movie industry in the Twin Cities ~ Robert Stephens

Supply always comes on the heels of demand. ~ Robert Collier

It's like this. Father Time keeps pitching the years at us. We swing and miss at a few. We hit a few out of the park. We try not to take any called strikes. ~ Robert Breault

WE WILL MEET AGAIN ON TOMAN HEAD. IT IS NEVER OVER, AL'THOR. ~ Robert Jordan