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?

I do not find that the age or country makes the least difference; no, nor the language the actors spoke, nor the religion which they professed, whether Arab in the desert or Frenchman in the Academy. I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

If we want to demoralize the population of Iraq and sap their will to fight, we ought to show them videotapes of the South Bronx, Detroit City and the West Side of Chicago. Take a look, you Iraqis – this is what we do to our own cities in peacetime. Just think what we’re going […]

So many women are being killed that women, until recently 51 percent of the world’s population, are no longer a majority. A 1991 U.N. publication reports that the elimination of females in places like India, Pakistan, Albania, and United Arab Emirates (48.3 women to 100 men!) offsets the female majority in developed countries to make […]

We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (1990)

What we want to have in existence, what we ought to have been creating in this time is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won’t cost very much, which the Labour government can swallow consistent with its’ principles, but under which our economic and […]