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Quotes About Hostages

to succeed Ronald Reagan, there were rising federal deficits, historic Cold War breakthroughs with Moscow, and, in the waning weeks of 1986, a scandal involving hostages in the Middle East, arms sales to Iran through Israel, and secret funding for the anti-Communist Nicaraguan contras.
~ Jon Meacham
The record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages as part of an initiative to reach out to moderate elements in Iran. "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there," Bush told his diary on Wednesday, November 5, 1986. "It is not a subject we can talk about.
~ Jon Meacham
Freeing hostages is like putting up a stage set, which you do with the captors, agreeing on each piece as you slowly put it together; then you leave an exit through which both the captor and the captive can walk with sincerity and dignity.
~ Terry Waite
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.
~ Nigel Hamilton
No one is an 'expert' on terrorism. That is nonsense. Terrorism is fluid. It changes daily. Terrorism used to be hijacking an aircraft and forcing the pilot to take it to another location. This evolved into holding hostages aboard the craft to force governments to do something. Now we have hijackers willing to die on an airplane and kill every passenger along with them. Terrorists have become more desperate and bold.
~ Raymond Benson
Every love story,every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing. Blackmail, kidnapping, then, are among the extreme violations of the deal. Anyway, I seem to be about to have Jim's child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven't mentioned it to Jim.
~ Renata Adler
The Marathas soon detected their movements, surrounded them and fell on the column at first light: 350 were dead before noon. Egerton had no option but to surrender, and six days later signed the humiliating Treaty of Wadgaon. With this he handed over Raghunath Rao and several senior Company hostages and agreed to give up a swathe of Company territory to the Marathas.
~ William Dalrymple
I would have promised those terrorists a trip to Disneyland if it would have gotten the hostages released. I thank God they were satisfied with the missiles and we didn't have to go to that extreme.
~ Oliver North
They massacred their hostages, as well as their captives: two hundred young maidens were tortured with exquisite and unrelenting rage; their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses, or their bones were crushed under the weight of rolling wagons; and their unburied limbs were abandoned on the public roads, as a prey to dogs and vultures.
~ Edward Gibbon
From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.
~ Lady Gregory
The idea of hostages is very deep. Becoming pregnant is taking a hostage–as is running a pawnshop, being a bank, receiving a letter, taking a photograph, or listening to a confidence. Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing.
~ Renata Adler
Oddly enough, I find the best hostages are the live ones. - Karl
~ Kelley Armstrong
I don't encourage any act of murder nor do I glorify in anyone's death, but I do think that when the white public uses it's press to magnify the fact that there are lives of white hostages at stake, they don't say "hostages," every paper says "white hostages." They give me the impression that they attach more importance to a white hostage and a white death, than they do the death of a human being, despite the color of his skin.
~ x malcolm vi
One of Brown's slaveholding hostages at Harpers Ferry, Lewis Washington, a descendant of the nation's first president
~ David S. Reynolds
No commandment surpasses the one concerning the liberation of hostages, for they are among the starving, the thirsting, the stripped, always in danger of death.
~ Elie Wiesel
We should refuse to settle for a deal that fails to secure the release of American hostages and paves Iran's path toward realizing its nuclear weapon ambitions.
~ Thom Tillis
The first to grasp how sensitive Israeli public opinion was on the issue of hostages and M.I.A.'s - and therefore what a powerful weapon abduction could be - was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
~ Ronen Bergman
In Syria, for some time, they have been trading hostages for a number of things: for weapons, for money, for political influence, and for favors.
~ Christopher Voss
In my family, misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages.
~ Jerry Stahl
German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistance. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On
~ Erik Larson
We were tiny creatures, really; tiny and afraid, trying to hold our place on the little platform that was our earth. So while the world about us might seem so solid, so permanent, it was not really. We were all at the mercy of chance, no matter how confident we felt, hostages to our own human frailty.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that "to have children is to give hostages to fate.
~ Ann Rule
In fact, this is a blackmail of the terrorists at the expense of the suffering of the hostages.
~ Alberto Fujimori
You're the man who used to rescue hostages for a living. You are not allowed to not get out of this one. So stop worrying about me and start paying attention to what you are doing. Are you listening to me, Miles Vorkosigan? Don't you dare die! I won't have it!" That seemed definitive. Despite everything, he grinned. "Yes, dear," he sang back meekly, heartened.
~ Lois McMaster Bujold