I don't accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.

If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.

I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs.

Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.

My main expertise is in the past, but if I have to extrapolate into the future, I would say: no good news any time soon and an obvious exit strategy is not apparent to me.

It's not proper for a professor to go before a class and promote one party or another. That's not academic scholarship.

Partisan politics has no place in the classroom.

Public interest in most of the Middle East was slight at that time; the Arab-Israeli conflict was all that people were interested in and that was not my specialty.

I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought.

I think it's really unfortunate that academics have been sidelined in most important policy debates.

An occupying power has no right to make significant alterations in the character of the occupied society, to change the laws all around, without a strong security reason and so forth.

A voice of one insulted by injustice will make others to be delivered from the same injustice.

Good salesmanship is nothing more than maximizing the positive and minimizing the negative.

All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.

They didn't have a problem with me being wild and crazy when it came time to fill the arenas.

Everything's the same; I'm living with cancer and it's not going to stop me. But until you really test yourself and challenge yourself, I don't think you quite know.

I came out of the womb waving red lipstick.

To quit this troubled world is better than to enter it: the rosebud enters the garden with straitened heart and departs smiling.

Good advice is rarer than rubies.

Let him cut your skin, and you cut his flesh. Let him cut your flesh, and you cut his bones. Let him cut your bones, and you cut off his life

Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.