Quotes from Charles Glass

The population of Syria is so inharmonious a gathering of widely different races in blood, in creed, and in custom, that government is both difficult and dangerous."— Sir Mark Sykes, Dar Ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey

Meleager of Gadara called, in the first century BC, "one country which is the whole world.

Michel Samaha, a Lebanese politician with strong public links to the government in Damascus, calls the revolution against President Bashar al-Assad "a Salafist awakening.

The Armenians are a people who possess excellent hearts, and whose manners are mild and civil. They are deep politicians, and acquire great riches by commerce." Nothing had changed in two hundred years, except that the Armenians had endured intolerable suffering and lost a large part of their homeland, and their people, in Turkey.

She assured me that the regime had killed him. When I told her that a childhood friend of his had told me Sariya supported his father and his secularism, she admitted she might have been wrong. It was only what someone had told her.

The outsiders, with their own objectives, provided rifles, ammunition, communications equipment, military vehicles and combat advice to young men who lacked the discipline and patience for a long-term, non-violent and democratic struggle.

the sense of being dehumanised, reduced to little more than an extension of your equipment and weaponry, the constant feeling of being used as an object, manipulated by blind, invisible hands, controlled by a force that was either malignant or stupid, the sense of being exhausted in a metaphorical and quite often literal darkness, of being exhausted, frightened, sick, sometimes so weary that you slept while on your feet like a horse. And ignorance, stupefying, brutalising ignorance.

Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is literally what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone.

The population of Syria is so inharmonious a gathering of widely different races in blood, in creed, and in custom, that government is both difficult and dangerous."— Sir Mark Sykes, Dar Ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey (1904)