Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Engel

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Richard Engel.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Richard Engel is an American journalist and author who is the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News. He was assigned to that position on April 18, 2008 after serving as the network's Middle East correspondent and Beirut bureau chief. Before joining NBC in May 2003, Engel reported on the start of the 2003 war in Iraq for ABC News as a freelance journalist in Baghdad.

American - Journalist | Born: September 16, 1973

Source: Wikipedia

There are many Israelis who are not keen on Barack Obama - they did not want to see him elected.

Richard Engel

The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.

Richard Engel

War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.

Richard Engel

We're all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.

Richard Engel

I don't think I'm invincible.

Richard Engel

The Iraqi government will try and retake some of the cities have that been captured by ISIS. That means the Shiite government dropping bombs on civilian areas, on Sunni cities. There will likely be a response with car bombings here in Baghdad, and this could be a long fight.

Richard Engel

When you look at Syria, and you look at all the militant groups on the ground, there are many groups in Syria that could pose a threat to the United States, not just Khorasan.

Richard Engel

Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don't even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war.

Richard Engel

By 2007, Iraqi society had completely collapsed.

Richard Engel

Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.

Richard Engel

When students and liberals initially occupied Tahrir Square, it looked like it might be a passing thing.

Richard Engel

The Syrian border town of Qa'im was the main gateway Islamic radicals used to go to Iraq. Syria became the passageway for extremists from Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to fight a jihad against American forces in Iraq.

Richard Engel

Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.

Richard Engel

ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.

Richard Engel

There is no Afghan Awakening Movement.

Richard Engel

I'm basically a pacifist.

Richard Engel

Kidnapping is always a threat in this life of reporting on men hurting one another because of religion and politics.

Richard Engel

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

Richard Engel

Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.

Richard Engel

Based on the people l've spoken to, I think the impression is: Is America safer from Al Qaeda? Yes. Is America weaker as a nation because we have overspent and over-focused on Al Qaeda? Yes. I think that would be the conclusion that people seem to have come to and that I tend to agree with.

Richard Engel

Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.

Richard Engel

The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists.

Richard Engel

The U.S., often in secret, carries out counterterrorism missions all the time, with drones in places like Yemen and Somalia.

Richard Engel

Every child is taught if you try to please everyone, you end up upsetting everyone.

Richard Engel

The Sahara is Africa's great divide.

Richard Engel

Insurgencies are easy to make and hard to stop. Only a few ingredients need to combine to create an insurgency; like oxygen and fire, they're very common and mix all too often. The recipe is, simply, a legitimate grievance against a state, a state that refuses to compromise, a quorum of angry people, and access to weapons.

Richard Engel

We know that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has some very dangerous, very important leaders who are tied directly to the top leadership of al Qaeda central, including a man who was formerly Osama bin Laden's secretary.

Richard Engel

I think war should be illegal.

Richard Engel

A lot of Iran's empowerment is a result of the war in Iraq.

Richard Engel

The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist group.

Richard Engel

I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.

Richard Engel

For decades, Saddam and his Sunni minority had imposed their will on Iraq, carrying on a 14-century tradition of Sunnis controlling Mesopotamia despite a Shiite majority.

Richard Engel

An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.

Richard Engel

The U.S. spent years and years and billions of dollars to build the Iraqi army only to watch it collapse and hand over so many of its weapons.

Richard Engel

Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.

Richard Engel

Many governments are quick to condemn Assad, but a dwindling number of them would celebrate a rebel victory in Damascus.

Richard Engel

The U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11. I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it.

Richard Engel

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.

Richard Engel

For years, Lebanese have known that Palestinian camps like Nahr al-Barid and Ain al-Helwe - hopeless slums crowded with generations of disenfranchised Palestinian refugees who can't go home because of Israel, and can't work because of Lebanese laws - are awash with gunmen, criminals and, since the war in Iraq, al-Qaida inspired jihadists.

Richard Engel

The U.S. presence and American missteps made ethnic violence in Iraq far worse than it would have been otherwise after Saddam Saddam Hussein's fall.

Richard Engel

In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq's main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.

Richard Engel

If democracy brings an undemocratic group to power, is that a victory for democracy?

Richard Engel

Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.

Richard Engel

Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.

Richard Engel

Many senior government officials, CIA, FBI, counter terrorism officials - when they look back at the decade, they effectively conclude that the United States overreacted after 9/11.

Richard Engel

Egypt has a devout population. People go out, they pray, they fast.

Richard Engel

For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.

Richard Engel

I had some training on how to cope with hostage-taking.

Richard Engel

Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.

Richard Engel

I don't think you're going to be seeing the U.S. employing large army divisions to deal with small terrorist groups again. I don't think they're going to be occupying foreign nations in order to dry up terrorist groups within them. I think that lesson has been learned.

Richard Engel

Lebanon does not have a powerful army.

Richard Engel

The Syrians are better suited to sort out their internal divisions than anyone else.

Richard Engel

We should have a time to reflect on the accomplishments of the military, of their sacrifices, of their failures.

Richard Engel

President George W. Bush, in his now-rare public appearances and interviews, still refuses to acknowledge he did anything to help Iran. But it doesn't really matter what he thinks.

Richard Engel

Under Islamic law, adoption is difficult.

Richard Engel

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

Richard Engel

The Donetsk People's Republic is the self-declared pro-Russian government that wants to break away from Ukraine.

Richard Engel

There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.

Richard Engel

Unfortunately, the American policy towards Pakistan is just to worry and express concern, and that is not a clear policy at all.

Richard Engel

The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.