102 Quotes by Robert Fisk

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.