Robert Krulwich Quotes

Borders most often result from wars or peace treaties that end wars.

Bad neighbors will keep cartographers busy well into the next century.

I feel like the history between Israel and Palestine has a lot in common with the history between India and Pakistan.

I lived on the Greek side of Cypress, and I think that's also where my interest in politics really started to come alive. It was the first time that I was told I couldn't go somewhere: My grandfather's house is on the Turkish side, but we were not allowed to go there.

The country was made without lines of demarcation and it is nobody's business to create them.

Borders cannot be redrawn in blood.

The war shall give us our land. The concept of "ours" and "not ours" are peace concepts only, they lose their meaning during war.

… empires cannot be shattered and new states raised upon their ruins without disturbance. To create new boundaries is always to create new troubles. The one follows the other.

...In practice it is found that International Law is always on the side of strong battalions...It is puerile...to apply to the dealings of a nation with its neighbor's territory the morality which would be applicable to two individuals possessing adjoining property, and protected from mutual wrong by a law superior to both.

Mountains interposed Make enemies of nations, who had else Like kindred drops been mingled into one.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

No border that touches Israel is always secure.

Each and every day, Israel's very existence is at stake.

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

How strange it is that murder has the sanction of law in one and only one of the human relationships, and that is the most important of all, that of nation to nation.

The West will have to choose: either to come to terms with Russians, or to receive a retaliatory blow. This retaliatory blow will not be by means of war. We will resort to the same weapon: nationalism.

For many years, I supported the concept of separate states.

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.

In these days of intimate relations, of economic stress and of intense desire to protect national interests and advance national opportunity, the treatment of questions which, from a legal standpoint, are domestic, often seriously affects international relations. The principle, each nation for itself to the full extent of its powers, is the principle of war, not of peace.

A nation cannot choose its neighbors.

We are two nations.

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

Every nation reserves the right to go to war with every other nation. Therefore, every ethnic group wants to be a nation.

The English people would never consent to go to war for a cause in which England was not manifestly interested.

If the whole of the 20th century has taught us anything, it has taught us that borders must be respected.