Hostage Crisis Quotes

Tell the terrorists that we will not give in to your demands. We insist you free the hostages. If you do not do so peacefully, we are ready to use force…. The only ‘deal’ we are prepared to do with you is this: If you surrender without a fight, you will stay alive.

In the past, Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, of which SEAL Team 6 is a key component, has only launched ground raids in Yemen when the lives of hostages held by al Qaeda seemed at risk.

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

America faced its first hostage crisis in the Middle East… Thomas Jefferson was President and over 100 Americans were being held hostage by Arabs from the Barbary Coast and the Arabs believed that if they were killed, they would go immediately to heaven. 220 years later America is still facing the same problem.

Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.

Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.

President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages.

Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.

The American pledge not to negotiate with terrorists has been honored more in the breach than the observance from the moment President Ronald Reagan made it.

Hostage taking is hell on a human scale.

We don’t negotiate for hostages’ release.

I remember the last three days that I was president, I never went to bed at all. I never went to bed until we had negotiated the final release of the hostages.

In my years as the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator, I learned an important fundamental lesson: Hostage negotiation is often nothing more than a business transaction.

In the United States, Iran is nothing but a whipping-boy. Few Americans have any real use for Iran. Most of us, what we know and remember about Iran are things like the hostage crisis in 1980, or they think about the Iranian attacks in Lebanon, or on the Khobar Towers. So you don't get a whole lot of political mileage in the United States by going out and advocating better relations with the Iranians.

The fact is that Americans were sent to Russia that have not been returned.

Few Westerners know Iran as well as Robin Wright: her first trip there as a journalist was in 1973, and she has covered every important milestone since, from the Islamic revolution and the hostage crisis to the more recent staring contest with the West over Tehran's nuclear program.

We exercise great caution in airing an audio- or videotape released by a terrorist organization holding a hostage. These are decisions made by CNN's editorial staff and not by any third party.

In many ways I'm similar to Barack Obama, who also has a strange name but was raised by a white American mother. His background is far more complicated than his name would suggest. Furthermore, the fact that I was a child during the hostage crisis has caused me to equate being Iranian with being alienated.

Has one hostage from Lebanon come back with a photograph of his abductors? Has any hostage ever come back with a photograph of his abductors smiling? I mean, this was so incredible!

It's becoming very much like 1979 again.

Give the Serbs 48 hours, and if they don't release the hostages, bomb them to hell.

We will fight hostage taking like we fight terrorism.

Spain has been battling terrorism for 30 years while we were trading arms for hostages.

The federal government of Nigeria has always preferred to talk to bona fide Boko Haram leaders about the release of the Chibok girls, but we must have a credible person or persons that will intervene, preferably United Nations or NGOs.

In those years,'80 was the, at the turn of '79/'80 you had the invasion of Afghanistan. It was the period in which the Americans attempt to liberate, to, to liberate the hostages in Iran and all these, all these things, the atmosphere was freezing - boycott of the Olympic Games and all that.