QuoteLog

“We make war that we may live in peace.”

“Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.”

“War is capitalism with the gloves off.”

“I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through, and it is very easy to understand that, if you realise the area of space.”

“I guess I figured I’d left no real room for confusion after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?”

“As the community of artists sifts through this brilliant horror and the retaliatory vengeance, we will see a distinct change in the cultural product of our times.”

“Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.”

“They said to get back to work. There were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying, which I would have gladly taken. So I came back here.”

“I can give vent to my emotions. I’ve been doing a lot of crying over the murder of thousands of my fellow citizens. I could not do that if I were at CNN.”

“I will say that Aaron Brown on CNN was the man I wanted standing on my roof, from whom I’d even buy insurance, while Bill O’Reilly factoring on Fox was a guy I wouldn’t let in to check the Con Ed meter.”

“Contempt for the things people choose of their own free will is, at its heart, contempt for free will.”

“The blues is a healer. It healed me and it’ll heal you.”

“The baseball players went back to work last night. Chipper Jones hit a home run in the first inning, and the Philadelphia fans booed him. That’s their job. And the audience is getting back to work, too.”

“John Updike is writing a novel about the art world, and he said that when he heard about the disaster, the work and the entire subject seemed trivial. But then, he said, he realized that continuing to write was ‘my only haven.’ He could lose himself in it. And besides, being a novelist, Mr. Updike said, is ‘my contribution to the civil order.’ “

“That’s why I live out here in the mountains with a flag on my porch and loud Wagner music blaring out of my speakers. I feel lucky, and I have plenty of ammunition. That is God’s will, they say, and that is also why I shoot into the darkness at anything that moves. Sooner or later, I will hit something Evil, and feel no Guilt. It might be Osama Bin Laden. Who knows?”

“If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”

“Miraculously, the first set we played was full of uplift. But I really spun out for the second set, I couldn’t find my footing, and my wife said I was doing all this playing in the upper register. And I could only respond that I was thinking about those high floors.”

“I remember thinking how strange it was to hear an anchorman on TV say this and that would remain closed but that Broadway shows would be open again. I felt a little embarrassed.”

“For all their grievances against America, there have been no Cuban, Vietnamese or Serbian suicide bombers bringing death to our shores, and their people haven’t been celebrating in the streets at the sight of American blood.”

“I agree that the Palestinian people have gotten a raw deal. But let’s not pretend that the Israelis are their only tormentors. The Arab states who now claim to want them to have a homeland weren’t in such a rush to give them one when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza from 1948-67.”

“As the tragedy unfolded over the span of 18 minutes that separated the two crashes, and over the following 47 minutes before the first tower collapsed, who knows how many scores of cameras--professional and amateur alike--were trained on the unbelievable sight? Relative to our technologically sophisticated world of instant communications, the terrorist assault took an eternity. Untold numbers of images were made while millions of television viewers watched in real time. Dozens of first-rate photographs of exactly the same subject were published almost simultaneously.”

“Sometimes we can become so frozen by our sense of helplessness. Art allows us a way past our own frozenness. It may give you some way to understand what you’re feeling, that this is a human feeling. Because what we’re feeling is a sense of inhumanness.”

“Even under normal circumstances, it’s necessary for camera crews to be surreptitious in Afghanistan. According to [CNN’s Nic] Robertson, the Taliban forbids the filming of any living creature, so crews must shoot from inside cars or from interior locations.”

“Still, in terms of their efficiency as an army, their biggest problem was the mullah influence over them. Because of the doctrine that it’s a great honour to die in a holy war, they were fearless and took risks that western soldiers perhaps would not. This is not the point of a military exercise, which is to defeat the enemy and live to fight another day. If you are reckless with your life, you risk depleting the army before it has won. But it was almost impossible to raise this issue with them; it would have invited a lot of trouble.”

“The people who did this to us are monsters; the people who cheered them have hate-sickened minds. One reason they can cheer is that they know we would never do to them what their heroes did to us, even though we could, a thousand times worse. They know that when we hunt down the monsters, we will try hard not to harm the innocent. Those are the handcuffs we willingly wear, because for all our flaws, we are a decent people.”

“In some ways, it feels as if Tuesday’s attacks blew a crust of rancid sugar off the nation; suddenly the vulgar nature of popular culture seems not only juvenile, not just banal, but wrong. Eminem: Shut up. Go away. Miss Spears: Put some clothes on, young lady, and stop writhing around with snakes. Grow up.”

“We are all running from that turmoil. That is why we seek refuge in the U.S. And now we see the same thing happening here. If this thing does not have an end to it, this can destroy us all.”

“Unless you were standing in New York City or in Somerset, Pa., I don’t think the full impact is going to sink in for a while. Television is a filter. You are not really seeing this.”

“This incident is a pretty severe test of character; not everyone will pass it. Some will use it as a chance to lecture and point fingers, others will use it as an excuse to indulge their own frustrations and aimless rage with explosions of bigotry and hatred.”

“These hijackings are manifestations of satanic consciousness. I see no point in pretending spiritual love by showing tolerance for them. Evil is not tolerant of Good. Good cannot excuse evil in the name of spirituality. We must sternly oppose sin, while at the same time always wishing good to all sinners. It would be undharmic, which is to say unrighteous, to do nothing: It would show nothing but spinelessness.”

“You don’t have to be in New York to be a New Yorker this week. You don’t have to be in the Lower 48 to feel your heart buried in the rubble of Manhattan. You do not have to be an American to be part of the struggle to come.”

“They were able to do it in part because our airport security is pathetic. But mainly they were able to do it because we are an open and trusting society that simply is not set up to cope with evil men, right here among us, who want to kill as many Americans as they can.”

“You can be sure of one thing: if the threat of islamic terrorism isn’t defeated, we will lose our liberties in the name of security.”

“Self-defense is not retribution. The day we impose a dictatorial theocracy, strip women of the most basic human rights, dynamite the art of other religions, train our children to hate Jews, and give aid, comfort and money to a man who exults in the deaths of innocent people, then we’re down at the Taliban’s level.”

“We won’t be making war against our enemies because they are evil and we are good. We will be making war against these people because they are killing Americans and our allies, and we have to make them stop.”

“The latest count is that there are about six-thousand people confirmed dead or missing. That number is sure to grow. So the next time you think “I’m sick of this”, it might be a good exercise to count the next six-thousand people you see.”

“I hold on to the anger; I turn it on the lathe, hold it up to the light, test its point. Because the moment I put it down I will lose all composure, and there will be no end to the tears.”

“We all are going to be bankrupt before the end of the year. There is not an airline that I know of that has the excess cash to handle this.”

“There are clear indications that the U.S. public and officials are suddenly aware of the Israeli situation. Potentially, it’s a very fundamental shift, with the U.S. taking the lead rather than staying neutral and acting cautiously.”

“I’ve never been so happy in my life as when I heard the news. The Americans are responsible for everything. ‘The friend of your enemy is your enemy,’ I am against killing of innocent civilians, but the Americans are bad. This is good for us, the Palestinians.”

“When I walked out of the subway, I went into reportorial autopilot. I know this now because I am looking at my notes as if I had never seen them before.”

“The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don’t say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.”

“The world must not be cowed by terrorists. Neither the terrorists who hijacked planes and killed those innocent people, nor those who threatened to shoot or maim women and girls who do not dress in a particular way.”

“These people try to hide. They won’t be able to hide forever. They think their harbors are safe, but they won’t be safe forever. One has to say it’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism.”

“We have suffered so much. Every night so many children go to bed hungry. What do we have to live for? Let the rockets come and set this whole country on fire once and for all.”

“On Monday, when the stock markets reopen, every American should buy five or ten or twenty shares of their favorite stock. It doesn’t matter what, and it doesn’t have to involve spending a fortune. But if enough people did this, it could well serve to not only jump-start the markets, but boost consumer confidence and perhaps prevent the supposed psychological recession that some economists are sure will follow Tuesday’s tragedy.”

“A long-term air campaign is a possibility -- but against a country such as Afghanistan, the targets available do not support such a campaign, nor is it clear where the air bases for waging such a war would be based. Finally, a conventional invasion of Afghanistan is out of the question. There are no bases in place and nowhere to build up the force, and the logistical requirements would be nightmarish ... To destroy terrorist cells requires the United States to rely heavily on covert operations in conjunction with an air campaign. The paradigm for this comes from Israel, which combines air attacks on enemy facilities with a global covert campaign designed to disrupt and destroy enemy capabilities.”

“The planners, already having committed substantial resources to the World Trade Center and Pentagon strikes -- and knowing it would be difficult to reinforce them for some time - surely put some thought toward expanding terrorist forces in the United States to include a second or even third team. Given the already high number of people involved, the security risks of a large operation had already been incurred. The use of additional teams, particularly teams with limited knowledge of each other, might not cost or risk much more ... The goal of a multi-phased operation would be to maintain psychological pressure on the United States -- keeping the population and government off balance -- and to retaliate for inevitable American counterstrikes. Such strikes would not have to be as sophisticated or complex as the Sept. 11 attacks. Most important, they would not and should not be self-liquidating attacks in which the operatives would be destroyed in a single spectacular strike. Rather, these operations should be both effective and repeatable by the same team, at least until it was captured.”

“There is a model available from Israel’s operations following the Munich Olympic massacre in 1972. Although a number of Arab countries clearly supported the attackers, Israel did not attack those countries directly ... Rather, Israel accepted the amorphous nature of the attackers but nevertheless imposed on them a corporate identity - accepting them as an entity and holding the entire entity responsible, including all individuals regardless of what they knew, when they knew it or what they did. Israel launched a global attack on the entity, using its intelligence services and covert forces. The primary goal was destroying the operating capacity of what Israelis called ‘terrorist groups’ through killing key operatives and members of the command and control system. They did not strike in response to any particular act, nor did they constrain their actions by legalities.”

“We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwah.”

“If there are Americans clamoring to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, they ought to know that this nation does not have so far to go. This is a post-apocalyptic place of felled cities, parched land and downtrodden people.”

“We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules, and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists. It won’t be easy.”

“The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ’s sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don’t do that kind of thing.”

“If you can operate a lap-top computer, you can fly a modern jet. Taking control of it and pointing it at a target only requires basic, rudimentary skills.”

“I could teach my 12-year-old daughter to do it on a [computer] flight simulator. The act of guiding the planes into a stationary target would be a simple task for any private pilot.”

“When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice. I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.”

“In June I wrote a column about the fact that a few cell-phone threats from Osama bin Laden had prompted President Bush to withdraw the F.B.I. from Yemen, a U.S. Marine contingent from Jordan and the U.S. Fifth Fleet from its home base in the Persian Gulf. This U.S. retreat was noticed all over the region, but it did not merit a headline in any major U.S. paper. That must have encouraged the terrorists. Forget about our civilians, we didn’t even want to risk our soldiers to face their threats.”

“People who want our country destroyed live here, work for our airlines, and are submitted to the exact same airport shakedown as a lumberman from Idaho. This would be like having the Wehrmacht immigrate to America and work for our airlines during World War II. Except the Wehrmacht was not so bloodthirsty.”

“We’re all gonna die, but three of us are going to do something. I love you honey.”

“All of a sudden there were people screaming. I saw people jumping out of the building. Their arms were flailing. I stopped taking pictures and started crying.”

“Retaliation, when it comes, will have to be as coolly calculated and well targeted as Tuesday’s attack. The memory of our dead deserves no less.”

“Yesterday was our Pearl Harbor. Our generational wake-up call. Our bloody moment of shattered self-complacency. It’s time to grow up, get real, and finally grasp, like generations before us, that freedom is not free.”

“We of a certain age have become so accustomed to affluence and security that we pay heed to the doings in the Middle East only when we have to pay 10 cents more for the gallons we need to fill up the SUVs we would never think of taking off-road. We of a certain age awoke Tuesday to behold something so utterly strange to us that all our antecedents, all our points of reference, were rendered null and void. What we saw wasn’t like anything. What we saw was new and real and horrifying.”

“We’re hearing a lot from veterans and recent discharges who want to get back into active service. Pilots for Delta who were Marine Corps fighter pilots. People like that. Phones are ringing off the hook.”

“American Muslims, who unequivocally condemned today’s terrorist attacks on our nation, call on you to alert fellow citizens to the fact that now is a time for all of us to stand together in the face of this heinous crime. It is not the time for speculative accusations and stereotypical generalizations that can only serve to harm the innocent and to endanger our society and its civil liberties.”

“We do not yet have a target, nor an identified enemy. But we do now have a purpose worth dying for. Weep for innocence gone. Resolve at whatever the cost to those now living that our children and grandchildren will abide in a world where terrorists do not hijack innocents to cause the death of innocents. This generation has never known what it would value more dearly than life itself. After Tuesday, we do.”

“The moral highground bares our throat to the wolves. The moral highground binds us to the pillory. It’s not rhetoric, folks - it’s simple fact. Without a viable deterrent, we are swimming bloody and naked among the sharks. They will eat at leasure.”

“This is totally wrong. I’m talking according to my faith. I’m a practicing Muslim. Allah says in the Koran that anyone who kills an innocent is like someone who kills all of humanity ... The word Islam, in Arabic, means peace.”

“In the old days, we’d be getting faxed from three or four different groups, each one saying ‘We did it.’ But when you’re fighting a war, the objective is to inflict casualties. You don’t need to say it was you.”

“This is the horrifying reality that Israel has been dealing with; when the monsters create the rules, how can you avoid taking on some of their attributes in the battle?”

“Our heart is with the US. Our hearts are with their families. America has paid a very high price, but America remains the only country that can save the world from this ... Everybody who is engaged in terror is endangering humanity.”

“This is a price you pay for a weak response to the Lockerbie bombing, a weak response to the first World Trade Center bombing, a weak response to the bombing of the USS Cole, a weak response to the Africa embassy bombings. We’ve allowed Osama bin Laden to go on with life, to be protected by the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

“It’s not just a crime against the American people, it’s not just a crime against the American civilisation. It’s a crime against the very foundations of all our humanity.”

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”

THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.

“The Web is - or should be - a new beginning. A tabula rasa. So why smear this freshly gessoed, stretched, and easeled canvas with the same old daubs?”

“The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.”