Near East Quotes

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.

I am the Counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

At present many nations in Asia and the Near East think of us as being more willing to use military force than are the Soviets. I think this is a regrettable impression to make in any area of the world.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.... We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other.

… this whole Near East problem is not just an Arab-Israeli dispute but a problem of the influence of the West as opposed to that of the Soviet. We want no wars, but we do not want a Sovietized world.

Day by day, the things that happen in Alabama and Mississippi are doing us harm in our fight against Communism in Asia, Africa and the Near East.

We have a house near East Hampton, and of all the beaches I've been to, I think there is something so beautiful about Long Island beaches. I love them in the fall and winter.

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

It is possible to take the story of Noah figuratively, although virtually every Near East ancient civilization has its own version of the flood story (including the amoral epic of Gilgamesh).

Learning to read the Bible in the light of the times in which it was written is critical. Reading it uncritically, without understanding the cultural and historical setting of the text, leaves us forced to accept scientific and sociological norms of the ancient Near East from 3,000 years ago.

Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.

Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine husband or lover of any.

My greatest moment as a jock occurred when I was 14 and playing punch ball in front of my house on Albemarle Road near East 17th Street in Brooklyn. I ran back, back for a ball, and it fell in my hands. I didn't even see it. Everyone congratulated me on the catch, and I never told them how it really happened.

Contrary to an impression which is somewhat widespread in this country, this government, while it has always exerted its influence in a humanitarian way, has not assumed political obligations with respect to the Armenians or other Christian minorities in the Near East.