top of page
"Iraq is a country that has been invaded. It's not a failing state that you want to help. It's a country that was functioning good or bad, with a horrible dictator, but you have invaded."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Country quotes

"The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns."

"I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?"

"Sometimes I wonder if I got lulled into not wanting things because I grew up black in this country."

"We do have a problem in this country. You can either make a movie and ignore that, or you can acknowledge it and say, this is the water that we're living in. You know this - the movie lives in this - it's centered around this particular problem, and I chose to acknowledge it."

"To wait for hours to buy a train ticket or to see a doctor is accepted as a normal way of doing things. Privacy is not a great preoccupation, and this is a very crowded country."

"Tyrone, I think they're taking to festivals. I don't know which festivals it will be at. It's like a buddy picture. It's a couple of guys driving across the country and they get to a small town and they hit a guy. The guy turns out to be a drug smuggler."
Explore more quotes by Lakhdar Brahimi

"There is a story which is not being told strongly enough of the Afghan employees of the UN inside the country who are saving hundreds of thousands of lives everyday by their bravery and nobody talks of them."

"But you've got to understand what the other guy is about, even if at the end of the process you decide that there is no ground with this man or woman except to fight them."

"There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people."

"Somebody was asking me the other day - President Bush is now talking about freedom for the Arab world. I say, well, that's great. I was talking about that fifty years ago."

"The mandate you go with is intimidating and also is a source of respect that you gain, because you have come with this mandate from the United Nations."

"But I knew that what had happened was an eye-opener not only to the United States but also to Pakistan, who realized that after what has happened on the 11th of September, it was simply impossible to continue to play those games in Afghanistan."

"However, it does seem now that the international community, more importantly the powers that have influence, and, even more importantly, Afghanistan's neighbors realize that it is high time that they work together, and not against one another."

"So, the international community are all the countries that are important: the United States definitely everywhere; the European Union because it is very important, and also, they do show a great deal of international responsibility; and then the local players."

"In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don't know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars."
bottom of page