Robert Fisk famous quotes

U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.
-- Robert Fisk

#Thinking #Government #Courageous

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

#Jobs #Worry #Trying

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

#Coffee #Italian #Iran

Everyone outside the Roman Empire was called a barbarian. Everyone outside Obama’s empire is called a terrorist.
-- Robert Fisk

#Empires #Barbarians #Terrorist

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

#Iran #Trying #Might

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

#War #Father #Land

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

#Relax #Imagine #Fingers

And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.
-- Robert Fisk

#Hours #Double Take #Humans

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

#Stories

I wouldn't say I was part of an anti-war campaign.
-- Robert Fisk

#War #Campaigns #Anti War

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

#Appreciate #Way #Dungeons

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

#War #Israel #Enemy

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

#Eerie #Soldier #Als

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

#War #Thinking #Views

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

#Morning #Successful #Army

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

#Names #Democracy #Assad

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

#Letting Go #Looks #Should

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

#Men #Want #Illusion

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

#Book #Son #Years

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

#War #Party #Tired

The sheer violence of it, the howl of air raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles carried its own political message; not just to President Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions said last night. This is how we do business.
-- Robert Fisk

#Fall #Cutting #Night

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

#Race #World #Want

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

#Land #People #Southern

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

#Uniforms #Victim #Conviction

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

#War #Humanity #Looks

I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.
-- Robert Fisk

#Bin Laden

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

#Mean #Thinking #Cities

In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.
-- Robert Fisk

#Years #Waiting #Littles

War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.
-- Robert Fisk

#War #Victory #Spirit

I suppose, in the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.
-- Robert Fisk

#Trying #Firsts #Reason

And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.
-- Robert Fisk

#War #Thinking #Government

Colleagues will malign you if you’re a moderately successful journalist,
-- Robert Fisk

#Successful #Journalist #Colleagues

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

#President #Narrative #Accepting

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

#New Relationship #America #President

Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the "liberating" kind.
-- Robert Fisk

#Two #Tanks #Kind

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

#War #Lying #Nuts