A Quote by Terry Jones

What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.

Terry Jones

Quote Topics

About Abstract Alarms Bush Circles Going Grammar Hard How Known Me Noun Nouns President President Bush Really Surrender Terrorism Very Wage War War On Terror War On Terrorism Well Well Known

Quote Author

Terry Jones
British - Comedian
February 1, 1942 - January 21, 2020

Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?

Terry Jones

"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.

Gore Vidal

The catch-all phrase "the war on terrorism", in all honesty, has no more meaning than if one wants to wage a war against "criminal gangsterism". Terrorism is a tactic. You can't have a war against a tactic. It's deliberately vague and non-definable in order to justify and permit perpetual war anywhere and under any circumstance.

Ron Paul

I intend to vote for President George W. Bush in the next election, because in my view, he is best able to wage the war against international terrorism.

Ed Koch

In fact if you look at Reagan's global war on terrorism it very quickly turned into a massive terrorist war: [by us] Central America, South Africa, the Middle East, all U.S.-backed terrorism. That's one of the reasons why it disappeared from history and why the standard line is that Bush 43 declared the war on terror. Actually he just repeated what Reagan had said 20 years earlier.

Noam Chomsky

George Bush didn't campaign on, 'If you elect me, I'm going to be a great president to confront terrorism and launch a war in the Middle East' because nobody was thinking about it in the year 2000. But it became the defining issue of his presidency.

Mike Huckabee

How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?

Howard Zinn

Surrender. That's an interesting term. We tend to see all forms of surrender as negative--war, sports, highway on-ramps. You'd never hear us describing a relationship as a type of surrender. But maybe we should. Is it wrong to cede the solo to the duet. Surrender doesn't mean you lose, only that you no longer wish to fight.

Franz Wisner

To Mr. Seward: It is my desire that, in case Maximillian will surrender, he be sent here a prisoner of war, but that in the event of his continuing the war, or refusing to surrender, then he be shot.

Joshua A. Norton

Mr. Speaker, I agree with those who say that the Global War on Terrorism is actually a Global War of Ideas and that terrorism is one of the tactics used in that War.

Mac Thornberry

I consider Bush's decision to call for a war against terrorism a serious mistake. He is elevating these criminals to the status of war enemies, and one cannot lead a war against a network if the term war is to retain any definite meaning.

Jurgen Habermas

Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.

Howard Zinn

I think that the idea of a war on an abstract noun is unacceptable.

Hamza Yusuf

A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.

John Mortimer

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a 'war on terrorism' is a contradiction in terms.

Howard Zinn

War is a lie. War is a racket. War is hell. War is waste. War is a crime. War is terrorism. War is not the answer.