Quotes About Beirut

Beirut is where I was born and raised.

When I go to Beirut, I don't drive. It's traumatizing to drive there.

Beirut. What does that say to you? CAMPBELL: It says to me that they don't know how to apply their religious ideas to contemporary life, and to human beings rather than just to their own community. It's a terrible example of the failure of religion to meet the modern world.

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.

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden.She'll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.

Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it.

In Beirut, death's unremitting light shines bright for all to see, brighter than the Mediterranean sun, brighter than the night's Russian missiles, brighter than a baby's smile.

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She'll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.

Beirut è la Elizabeth Taylor delle città: folle, malandata, a pezzi, sulla via del tramonto, e sempre carica di drammaticità. Sposerà anche uno spasimante infatuato che le promette di renderle la vita più agiata, nonostante non sia all'altezza.

Every Beiruti of a certain age has learned that on leaving for a walk you should never be too sure of returning home, not only because something might happen to you personally, but also because your home might cease to exist.

In the summer of 1982, while Israeli armored tanks and gunships imposed a siege of another age on rampartless Beirut, cutting off the water supply and food shipments, the modern catapults, the air force, leveled residential buildings, destroyed all infrastructure, and, amazingly, bombed the synagogue of Beirut's Jewish neighborhood. There is no contradiction.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

We may be unable to maintain even a semblance of order in our urban schools, which increasingly resemble happy hour in Beirut. But, hallelujah, we sure know how to protect kids from God.

All you need is a pool table, beer, an electric jukebox and good conversation. The day a girl beats me in a game of Beirut [a kind of beer pong] is a good sign!

I was actually lost in Beirut on the way home.

I often remember that dusty, ruined flat in old Beirut. And I know that a little part of me will stay there forever, laying out those treasures on the windowsill and playing at cat's cradle with my friend.

Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.

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.

In 1982, Israel began an invasion across its northern border, seeking to root out elements of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israeli military wreaked destruction all the way up to Beirut and forced the P.L.O. out of Lebanon. It also defeated the Syrian Army and, particularly, the Air Force wherever it engaged them.

There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire - this time under the Shia label.

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.

I should be in Beirut, I thought, working as a journalist, but another part of me was so wary of that old life of guns and misery. I did not want to see Tyre again, or Qana, or Baghdad. I wanted to do nothing more than move dirt from one place to another.

Our fumbling government's response since Beirut - during both Republican and Democratic administrations - has been to cut and run, or to flat ignore this growing threat, apparently hoping it would go away.