I always found it interesting when you went off to college, people would talk about how you go and search for your own identity. A lot of suburban middle-class kids would be shopping for identities and they would co-opt identities from other cultures.
I think the public is very reluctant to get involved in more foreign wars, especially in the Middle East. And they understand, implicitly, that we go to war in the Middle East because of oil. And if we don't want to go to war in the Middle East, then we have to do something about the oil problem. And I think that view is gaining ground in the U.S.
The Middle East is not part of the world that plays by Las Vegas rules: What happens in the Middle East is not going to stay in the Middle East.
In the Middle East, the conflict today is a matter of generations and not of cultures.
I think President Barack Obama came to office with quite fundamental understandings in his mind about what's possible and what's not possible in the Middle East. The first, I would say, revolutionary breakthrough that he introduced is that the Middle East doesn't matter to American geostrategy as much as we think.
The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.
People think just because I'm from the Middle East, I'm an expert on the Middle East. So, like, I got a friend, like, any time the gas prices go up, he'll always ask my opinion about it.
We're not in the middle east to bring sweetness and light to the whole world. That's nonsense. We're in the middle east because we and our European friends and our European non-friends depend on something that comes from the middle east, namely oil.
I think this does show that there will be some changes, not so much in Europe or Asia but certainly in the Middle East. General [James] Mattis has called for a comprehensive strategy to combat the various enemies the United States faces in the Middle East, especially Iran.
We can keep doing the same thing, but it would be unreasonable to expect a different result. It's very important, I think, for us to stop and look at what we're doing.We've been applying a flamethrower to the Middle East. And not just to the Middle East.
Ending torture and tyranny in Iraq was not a mistake. Supporting democracy in Iraq is not a mistake. Helping the long-suffering Muslims of Iraq who now seek to live democratically is not a mistake. In the long, long history of the Middle East, this breakthrough may one day be ranked as a dramatic turning point in regional history.
I think it's time we start chipping away at the stereotypes in Hollywood about the Middle East, and the Arab World, because it's one of the most beautiful regions in the world.
Egypt was - as it is now - a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.
I wrote and finished the script for 'Man in the Middle' two weeks after the September 11 bombing. It's a very American film about an ex-diplomat based in the Middle East, a leader in the U.S. administration who now sells used cars in the Middle East.
Absorbing. . . . Scrupulously reported . . . illuminates today’s Middle East. . . . The ‘least interventionist of any modern president,’ the father of the Eisenhower Doctrine that still defines US policy in the Middle East . . . in 1956 battled demons in bodies personal and politic and in the desert – and prevailed. Nichols’ book, written lean enough to allow the facts to speak for themselves, makes for exciting history.