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"If you cannot reduce your argument to a few crisp words or phrases there is something wrong with your argument. There was nothing longwinded about Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!"

Maurice Saatchi

"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"

"My feelings - as usual - we will slaughter them all"

"Our initial assessment is that they will all die"

"God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of Iraqis."

"No I am not scared, and neither should you be!"

"Be assured. Baghdad is safe, protected"

"I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide under the walls of Baghdad. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly."

Britain "is not worth an old shoe"

"The British forces which were dropped there have been eliminated mostly on the (battle)field, except for those who fled ... It is a complete defeat ... Amazingly the Americans have pushed the British to do that. They pushed them ahead as if it is an experiment. The result was very tragic for the British."

"I would like to clarify a simple fact here: How can you lay siege to a whole country? Who is really under siege now? Baghdad cannot be besieged. Al-Nasiriyah cannot be besieged. Basra cannot be besieged."

"they are nowhere near the airport ..they are lost in the desert...they can not read a compass...they are retarded."

"They are not in Baghdad. They are not in control of any airport. I tell you this. It is all a lie. They lie. It is a hollywood movie. You do not believe them."

"Today we slaughtered them in the airport. They are out of Saddam International Airport."

"We went into the airport and crushed them, we cleaned the WHOOOLE place out, they were slaughtered"

"Yes, the american troops have advanced further. This will only make it easier for us to defeat them"

"It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don't know why they were fired into Kuwait."

"They are retreating on all fronts. Their military effort is a subject of laughter throughout the world."

"Yesterday, we slaughtered them and we will continue to slaughter them."

"They think we are retarded - they are retarded."

"Whenever we attack, they retreat. When we pound them with missiles and heavy artillery, they retreat even deeper. But when we stopped pounding, they pushed to the airport for propaganda purposes.''

"We're now trying to exhaust them, until our leadership decides the time and method to clean our territory of their desecration."

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information (currently on administrative leave).

"Nobody can rule guiltlessly."

 ?" [the nameless ones] who must fill the trenches so that those following them can step on their bodies in their forward surge. [Their only crime that they] stand upright and go hand-in-hand and pretend they live in freedom."

"Peace, Human Rights and progress cannot be separated from each other."

(Perestroika) "I hope those who have started it will make a serious attempt to finish it."

January 1989, on M.S. Gorbachev: "Either the Conservatives will overthrow him, or they will dictate what policies he should follow."

"If we have to apportion blame, then we have to talk about our collective blame .. I'm no more to blame than anyone else, just because I participated directly [in their creation]" On nuclear bombs.

"... when they should have been defended, we remained silent."
"destiny or civic duty."

"Be prudent, and if you hear... some insult, or some threat... have the appearance of not hearing it."

Handsome Lawrence, George Sand

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Life of Reason, George Santayana

 "Dance your anger and your joys,
Dance the military guns to silence,
Dance oppression and injustice to death,
Dance my people,
For we have seen tomorrow
And there is an Ogoni star in the sky." (an ethnic Ogoni)

 "The only place where success comes before work is in a dictionary."

 "It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it." (1991 Peace Nobel, Burmese politician)

  "Home is the place where, since before you had words for such knowledge, you have known the smells, the seasons, the birds and beasts, the human voices, the houses, the ways of working, the lay of the land and the quality of light. It is the landscape you learn before you retreat inside the illusion of your skin.
 You may love the place if you flourished there, or hate the place if you suffered there. But love it or hate it, you cannot shake free.
 Even if you become intimate with new landscapes, you still bear the impression of that first ground." (US author and lecturer in Townships)

 "They're bursting with pride because they're going to lay an egg"
 (Marcelle, Age of Reason)

"Die Prinzipien ändern sich, die Gewohnheiten bleiben." die Eingeschlossenen p. 8.

"JOHANNA: Und was tun sie auf Erde - die Starken?
DER VATER: Im allgemeinen nichts.
JOHANNA: Das sehe ich.
DER VATER: Es sind die Leute, die von Natur aus mit dem Tod vertraut sind. Sie halten das Schicksal der anderen in ihren Händen." p. 23.

"KLAGES: Wenn ich einen einzigen Menschen verachte, nur einen einzigen, selbst einen Henker, kann ich keinen mehr respektieren.
FRANZ: Wenn ein Untergebener, nur ein einziger, der Gehorsam verweigert, wir dir keiner mehr gehorchen. Die Achtung der Menschen, darauf pfeife ich, aber wenn du die Disziplin in den Wind schlägst, dann ist das die Niederlage, das Massaker oder beides zugleich." p. 117.

"This so-called Solidarity lot aren't a trade union. They're an anti-Socialist organ who desire the overthrow of a Socialist state." 07.09.1983

Arthur Scargill

"Also it is announced that citizens of the DDR will be able to travel across all DDR border checkpoints. Visas will be required and all applications will be handled without delay." DDR Information Minister 09.11.1989

Gunther Schabowski

"Wir könnten viel wenn wir zusammenstünden."

"Freiheit ist nur in dem Reich der Träume, und das Schöne blüht nur im Gesang." - der Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts, 1802.

"Der Wechsel ist der Schrecken des Glücklichen."

"He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times."

Johann Von Schiller

 "Politiker-Verdrossenheit: Das heißt, die Politiker sind verdrossen über die Bedingungen, unter denen sie ihr Amt ausüben müssen." (former German Defence Minister, 1992)

"I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism."

Charles Schwab

 "I don't consider myself dovish. And I certainly don't consider myself hawkish. Maybe I would describe myself as owlish - that is, wise enough to understand that you want to do everything possible to avoid war; that once you're committed to war, then ferocious enough to do whatever is necessary to get it over as quickly as possible is victory." 01.11.1990

"Great God! This is an awful place." at the South pole, 17.01.1912

Captain Robert Scott

"Gladston ... spent his declining years trying to answer the Irish question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish changed the question." 1066 and all that

W H Sellar and R J Yateman

"It is not because things are dangerous that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that things are dangerous."

"He who has great power should use it lightly."

"Aequam memento rebus in arduiis servare mentem" remember to keep a calm mind in all difficulties

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to."

(Roman philosopher) Seneca

 "[Nationalism is] The application to national communities of the Enlightenment doctrine of popular sovereignty." or"A variant of eighteenth century doctrines of popular sovereignty, with half-digested chunks of socialism added to the broth."

 "A tiger terrorises a village, it's a man-eater. The villagers call in a marksman. He tethers a goat. The goat is sacrificed. The best moment for the marksman is when the tiger takes the goat. The tiger is shot, but that's academic for the goat. Tough on the goat ..." [alluding to the use of 'ambushes' or touts in Northern Ireland's Dirty War in Journeyman Tailor].

"Two great buildings, and their magnificence to emphasise a community's separation, St Anne's for the Protestants and St Patrick's for the Roman Catholics. Two great school complexes to hammer home a community's division, the Royal for the Protestants and the Academy for the Roman Catholics. Two main shopping streets to bring home the opposition of the cultures, Scotch Street for the Protestants and Irish Street for the Roman Catholics. Two spreading sports complexes where the people of the town were split, the rugby club to the east for the Protestants and the Gaelic pitches to the west for the Roman Catholics." on division in NI (Dungannon).

"It was a separated and divided town. There were no high barriers of corrugated iron to divide off each community's ghettos. [There were] unspoken boundaries. The soldiers patrolled the streets that were set aside for Roman Catholic homes, laden with backpacks and radios sets and machine guns, marked the territory of Roman Catholics. Young men, whipping orders in the patois of the north of England, questioning and frisking kids in a tongue that was foreign and hostile to the town. The police ruled the Protestants' roads and avenues. Crisply turned out, bulged by their bullet-proof vests, poweful with their carbine rifles and sub-machine guns, ties knotted neatly under their laundered collars .. " Journeyman Tailor, p. 261.