Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Beirut. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Beirut Quotes And Sayings by 83 Authors including Michael Hastings,Annia Ciezadlo,Najib Mikati,Clive Sinclair,P. J. O'rourke for you to enjoy and share.
In late 2009, I returned to Baghdad after a lengthy absence. I was living alone, in the Hamra Hotel, the twice bombed-out de facto international news bureau.
There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.
I am Lebanese, and I know the interests of my country.
Tel Aviv is buzzing with so much life, you could bottle it and sell it as honey, and even Jerusalem has a certain fizz. But if you want to see anger, go to Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon.
You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
A Mediterranean city is really my culture.
I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.
Although I went to college in the United States - Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota - I returned to the Middle East for a year in 1970-71 to study at the American University of Beirut.
I love the Middle East and have been lucky enough to visit a few of the countries like Egypt, Lebanon, Jordon and the U.A.E.
The Syrian border town of Qa'im was the main gateway Islamic radicals used to go to Iraq. Syria became the passageway for extremists from Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to fight a jihad against American forces in Iraq.
I'm going to the bathroom, not to Beirut. What horrible fate do you think's waiting for me in there? Death by toilet swirly?
The Middle East is America's 'champagne room'. No matter how much you spend, you will still never get what you want.
This must be Aleppo. Nothing to see, of course. Just a long, poor-lighted platform with loud furious altercations in Arabic going on somewhere. Two men below her window were talking French.
I love this city [Tel Aviv]!
What is the city but the people?
In Marrakech, Arabian open-heartedness is served up with a generous dose of pan-African mysticism, a dollop of French savoir-vivre, and a garnish of Moorish grace. The vibe is irresistible to meaning-of-life seekers and international hipsters looking for a scene.
Moslem conquest.
The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.
We have to look to the well-being of the Lebanese citizens and create prosperity in the country, and you can't create prosperity without stability.
Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it.
Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.
In Damascus:
the traveler sings to himself:
I return from Syria
neither alive
nor dead
but as clouds
that ease the butterfly's burden
from my fugitive soul
There's a big film industry in Egypt, and quite a big one in Syria, and there's a big Muslim community in Paris.
There's a great Lebanese restaurant a few blocks over. They have the best shawarma in the world."
"What's shawarma?"
"You know what a gyro is?"
"No."
"Same thing.
The Shat-el-Arab is a noble river or estuary. From both its Persian and Turkish shores, however, mountains have disappeared, and dark forests of date palms intersected by canals fringe its margin heavily, and extend to some distance inland.
During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.
Today Syria, tomorrow your country.
Afghanistan, one of the most inconspicuous nations on earth. In 1946 it was just emerging from the bronze age, a land incredibly old, incredibly tied to an ancient past. At the embassy we used to say, Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus.
Yemen produces coffee, Egypt cotton, Iraq dates, Palestine oranges, and Syria trouble.
There was a president imposed by Syria. Our battle ... is to have a Lebanese president that we elect.
And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.
In Palestine, the Israelis claim they found a land without people,' a Syrian officer explained to us. 'Now they will take southern Lebanon and claim they have found another land without people if these refugees do not return.
Marshall McLuhan was right when he said that television has made a global village of the world - but he didn't know the global village would be Beirut.
We must now make clear to Lebanon that it will not benefit from U.S. assistance and support as long as it harbors this brutal terrorist and murder.
My own agenda is going to be followed, and that agenda is to maintain very good relations with the international community, and Lebanon has to fulfill its commitments.
Lebanon is restless, Syria got its walking papers, Egypt is scheduling elections with more than one candidate, and even Saudi Arabia, whose rulers are perhaps more terrified of women than rulers anywhere else in the world, allowed limited municipal elections.
When Lebanon started its resistance it was a small and divided country.
To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
Muslim and non-Muslim from across the world flocked to Baghdad to be part of Al-Ma'mun's project "Bait Al-Hekmah" or "House of Wisdom
Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life.
The secret of any kind of reporting is to go with a guide. So if you, you're going to see Hezbollah in Beirut, you go with someone who knows the local people, and you'll be fine.
In Lebanon, it's never over for anyone. You cannot write off anyone or anything in this country.
My agenda is not to reassure anybody outside Lebanon.
For Lebanon to have any future, gotta adopt a resolute policy v/s terrorism. Whoever plots against the land should bear the consequences.
Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart.
Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly.
I want the Arabic Granada, that which is art, which is all that seems to me beauty and emotion
Well, Ramadi is a provincial capital of Anbar province. It's a sprawling city west of Baghdad. It's a poor city, endless cinderblock houses and high-rises almost as far as the eye can see.
This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences
The water of the river Jordan, in the name of Jesus, be driven back!
In a place of extreme violence and devoid of order, the practical subsumes the principle. I drifted down the path of bribery and corruption endemic to the streets of Baghdad
Nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the
Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.
Lebanon is a small country, weak, an army with very humble capabilities.
Welcome to Israel, where the beaches are great, the fruit is succulent, the landscape is mesmerizing, and all of it is stolen.
Hezbollah and the government are only two of 18 political factions in Lebanon, most of them armed. There are militant Christian groups, Palestinian radicals, al-Qaida, Druze militias and even armed bands of Marxists still operating in Lebanon.
Very few people are fortunate enough to walk through countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and I had seen them all. I had spoken to many on the street.
There must be some security arrangement in the south of Lebanon so northern Israel is not threatened anymore.
If I'm still walking, I am not dead. So I have to still walk and run towards the benefit of Lebanon.
For decades, the violence in the Middle East has claimed a multitude of innocent civilian victims: Men, women and children, Arab and Israeli.
Arab leaders worry more about making money from the profits they get from oil and gas that they turn the other way when Lebanon is being destroyed right next to them. Their neighbours are being murdered, but they only make calculations for their own benefit.
In one way, I fear all Damascus is a dungeon. Or do you have to live here to appreciate that?
The main problem that we have in Lebanon, and in the region, is we don't have a real peace process and I think this is the main focal problem that we have in the region.
I had never heard of the little Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. And yet, that's where it all began. With an ordinary incident, one that happens frequently, but so frequently that it finally started something unstoppable.
I'm proud of what I've done in Jordan, but the region itself is sitting on a time bomb.
PAPA: This damn country has done us in. That's why I'm like this. We should be there. Home.
NASSER: But that country has been sodomized by religion. It is beginning to interfere with the making of money. Compared with everywhere, it is a little heaven here.
I was 12 when my parents told me we were moving to Lebanon. I remember thinking, 'Leba-who?' I had absolutely no concept of the place.
Okay Libya ... got all this stuff twirling around in my head
You in Lebanon, your power is no match to Israel. Israel, militarily, is more powerful than you and maybe it is more powerful than all the Arab countries, or most of them.
I'm hopeful that Israelis can go to Ramallah whenever they want and see how the people are living.
Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East.
The red sands of Marrakesh, sprawling at the foot of the Atlas like a wounded Leviathan ...
I'm practically broke and homeless. This fatal city, Antioch, has devoured all my money: this fatal city with its extravagant life.
Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the UN Security Council. This means, in effect, that a terror organization presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world's security. You couldn't make this thing up.
I've spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco.
From here [the Gaza withdrawal], our people begin the march towards establishing an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital
Where there is no peace; there is not the slightest religion there.
I feel most strongly about Jerusalem, because architects ultimately have to address that city.
There are so many different sub-societies inside of Syria.
We want to see Israel withdraw from our territory. But we don't want to be accountable vis-a-vis Israel on the security basis, because we don't see, in the absence of a peace agreement, that Lebanon can really be accountable to Israel if anything happens.
Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.
Bahrain is very dear to me.
Grasping the realities of the Middle East is never easy. This is not primarily because they change quickly, but because so much time, effort, and money is spent to prevent reality from breaking through.
Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.
We believe democracy to be the only real guarantor of stability and we have sought to create a 'Jordanian model' that might also inspire others in our region. I wish democracy and peace to be my legacy to my people and the shield of generations to come.
Absent opens a door to a view of Iraqi life we have seldom seen. With a compassionate eye Khedairi explores a community, damaged by wars and sanctions, struggling for survival.
There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods today.
When a peace agreement is concluded between the Lebanese government and Israel, we would surely disagree with the Lebanese government about that, but we would not make any turmoil out of it.
Over the years, I've spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots.
The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues ...
We open our door, and we are still committed to open our door for our brothers in Syria. But doesn't mean that we should not keep alone. The international community should really - should really share Lebanon the numbers of refugees and share Lebanon the cost of their living.
Get the hell out of Palestine.
Syria has a strategic position in the region, I don't deny her role, her alliance with the resistance or our friendship with her although that many Lebanese pretended to have forgotten that there is an enemy called Israel which is still targeting us and constituting a danger to the Lebanese people.
Jerusalem is old, Jerusalem is new, Jerusalem can hold Moslem, Christian, Jew.
There's always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story.
I'm a Lebanese woman who directs films. That's not it at all. I am not really a woman nor am I really an Arab. Because I am not an apologist for women, nor of sentimental "world" films.
The wise traveler [to Beirut] will pack shirts or blouses with ample breast pockets. Reaching inside a jacket for your passport looks too much like going for the draw and puts armed men out of countinence
When I was a boy in Desuq, Egypt, a city on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, about 50 miles east of Alexandria, my family lived steps away from the local landmark, a mosque named for a 13th-century Sufi sheik.
Washington and New York, two primary targets for Al Qaeda.
A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.