Robert Fisk Quotes

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.

Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the "liberating" kind.

The Syrian army is tired of corruption. It is tired of party nepotism. It is becoming very angry with those it blames for the war.

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

Everyone outside the Roman Empire was called a barbarian. Everyone outside Obama’s empire is called a terrorist.

War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.

And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.

Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute - an illusion of course, but that's what Assad thought.

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

Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist.

I still wonder if the United States realizes how much planning went into this. When we talk about "mindless terrorists," we are lying to ourselves.

In one way, I fear all Damascus is a dungeon. Or do you have to live here to appreciate that?

I wouldn't say I was part of an anti-war campaign.

And history's fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.

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.

It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers.

President Bush will come here and there will be new "friends" of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who "liberated" them.

I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.

Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too?

I do not make stories up, full stop.

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 word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.

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.

Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.

People turn to violence, because they have no other avenue left.

In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.

Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy.

At the end of the day, bin Laden's interest is not Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud.

Journalism can be lethal