Arab Quotes

I have met charming people, lots of whom would be charming if they hadn’t got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners, and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don’t believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer […]

So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.

I’m the Sheik of Araby, Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep.

Since theological propositions are scientifically meaningless, those of us of pragmatic disposition simply won’t buy such dubious merchandise… Maybe – remotely – there might be something in such promotions, as there might be something in the talking dogs and the stocks in Arabian tapioca mines that W. C. Fields once sold in his comedies, but […]

Let me get this straight, we are going to war to defend people who won’t let women drive?

The Arabs are a backwards people who eat nothing but Camel dung.

Listening to the Walkman is about the only fun American troops are having in a place where there’s no booze and most of the women either are covered with the front hall rug or they outrank you. By now every American soldier has listened to every cassette and CD in Saudi Arabia at least twice.

Forget Reds under the Bed, there’s Arabs in the Attic.

I stopped in one of the oasis towns to get gas and some more Coke cans to throw out the window. There was a Bedouin kid about fourteen years old at the little store there. Most Saudis are – whether they take their socks off during ablution or not – fastidiously clean, and they are […]

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.