Top 60 Beirut Quotes & Sayings

No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.

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

I come from a specific area in Beirut where it's multicultural, and it's a culture that blends with multiple cultures - it's unbelievable lifestyle.

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.

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.

When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity.

As someone who escaped religious persecution in Lebanon and whose parents were kidnapped in Beirut, I fully support the protection of all individuals from institutional discrimination. That said, I am weary of the ethos of victimhood that has parasitized our culture.

My heart is heavy for the people of Paris, Beirut, and other nations affected by ISIS terrorists.

I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.

In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated.

I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it.

I knew Quintessentially was a success when my father, who does a lot of business in Beirut, introduced himself to somebody and they said, 'Oh, do you know Ben Elliot? I'd really like to meet him.' I remember him ringing me up, really annoyed.

Beirut turned into a war zone in a matter of hours. We were stuck at home, the roads were blocked.

Outside events can change a presidential campaign, a president, and the history of the nation: the Iranian hostage crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the downing of the helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, and, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.

I have had a strong and a long relationship on national security, I've been involved in every national crisis that this nation has faced since Beirut, I understand the issues, I understand and appreciate the enormity of the challenge we face from radical Islamic extremism. I am prepared. I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training. I wasn't a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn't a governor for a short period of time.

Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.

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.

I'd known the people at Rolling Stone for a while. I'd gone to them with a piece I'd done on Beirut for Vanity Fair that Vanity Fair didn't want to publish, because they said I was making fun of death... This was Tina Brown.But they paid me for it. So I've got this big chunk of a piece, and Rolling Stone liked it, but they thought it was a little dated. But then they called me back and asked me to do a similar piece about the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the whole government had been arrested for dope smuggling. That was fun.

Saudi Arabia has historically attempted to influence politics in Beirut.

It's not Beirut or Bosnia.

I was actually lost in Beirut on the way home.

I need to have one foot inside and one foot outside a culture to be able to write about it. For example, I couldn't write about the gay culture if I were wholly inside or outside of it. Finding that distance is always interesting. I jokingly say that when I'm in America, I write about Beirut, and when I'm in Beirut, I write about America. A lot of my friends in Beirut think I'm more American than Lebanese. Here, my friends think of me more as Lebanese.

In 1982, when Alexander Haig and [Ariel] Sharon put this plan to invade the south of Lebanon and Beirut, they imagined that in two or three or five days, they can demolish the PLO and destroy its infrastructure. What happened? The longest Arab - Israeli confrontation.

Growing up in Beirut, I used to go to the souks with my mother to buy fabrics... I understood fashion at an early age, and my first designs were when I was five.

Although I went to college in the United States - Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota - I returned to the Middle East for a year in 1970-71 to study at the American University of Beirut.

Many of Islam's apologists insist that suicide bombing is not Islamic because the Koran forbids suicide. Mmm-hmm. So where are all the Muslims gathering in mass demonstrations to vehemently condemn this practice that slanders their religion? Why does contemporary Islam promote 'martyrdom' as the highest duty of Muslims? Why are photographs of suicide bombers plastered everywhere in Beirut? Because Islam is what Islam does.

There was always a unique Beirut sound, it was always there, and so this time I just dove straight into that, instead of daydreaming and wandering.

In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

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.

Since 2006, when the Second Lebanon War killed perhaps 2,000 Lebanese, many of them civilians, and led to the destruction of an entire section of Beirut, the northern border has been absolutely quiet.

Every time I go to Beirut, I see people and the quality of life going slowly from bad to worse, and from worse to even worse.

For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.

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!

The wise traveler [to Beirut] will pack shirts or blouses with ample breast pockets. Reaching inside a jacket for your passport looks too much like going for the draw and puts armed men out of countinence

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.

Take a moment to reflect upon the existence of the musical The Book of Mormon. Now imagine the security precautions that would be required to stage a similar production about Islam. The project is unimaginable—not only in Beirut, Baghdad, or Jerusalem, but in New York City.

For me, diversity is not a value. Diversity is what you find in Northern Ireland. Diversity is Beirut. Diversity is brother killing brother. Where diversity is shared - where I share with you my difference - that can be valuable. But the simple fact that we are unlike each other is a terrifying notion. I have often found myself in foreign settings where I became suddenly aware that I was not like the people around me. That, to me, is not a pleasant discovery.

The first suicide bombing that entered my consciousness was the Beirut embassy bombing. It was very personal. I'd been in the embassy and I knew most of the people in the station who were killed in the bombing. So you take the personal aspect of it and the mystery of who the bomber was and the fact that a small group of people could drive us out of a country that was absolutely key to the United States, and what was behind this... The fact that they've been able to hide the embassy bombers' identities for all these years tells me we're up against a very capable movement.

People in the United States don't like to hear it, but puritanical Islam has been on the rise because of our unequivocal policy of absolute support for Israel, regardless of what Israel does - even if they invade Lebanon and bombard a major city like Beirut, full of civilians. Israel has atomic bombs, but we go nuts if any Arab country or Iran develops even nuclear capabilities.

It was important for me to show that Beirut and Lebanon were once the pearl of the Middle East. Beirut was once called the Paris of the Middle East and to have that feeling of a destroyed place that once was beautiful and glamorous and visually impressive was important. I think it's even sadder to get the feeling that this country, and indeed the whole Middle East, could have been a major force in the world if people would get together and forget about destruction, death and wars. But unfortunately, it's not happening yet.

For Beirut it was the civil war, and the dividing of the city - which is something that is shared among Beirut, Berlin and Baghdad. And Cairo is a city that has a scar that was born after many decades of dictatorship - oppression shaped the people's lives, and forced people to grow up accompanied by fear. I belong to a generation that, whether we like it or not, was shaped by this fear of death or loosing the people you love, the threat of war, not allowed to be yourself, forced to be silent - as you watch ignorance occupying everything around you. And this is a deep scar.

Beirut is where I was born and raised.

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.

I don't want to turn into one of those pathetic creatures who are always homesick, always saying I wish I were still in Beirut. I don't want to become like you, split between here and there. I know I'm not happy here, but why should I be unhappy in two countries?

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.

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

I'd spent thirty years visiting the Dalai Lama, and twenty years as a journalist going to difficult places, war zones and revolutions from North Korea to Haiti and Beirut to Sri Lanka, and the question came up: What does this man have to offer to this world which seems so torn up and so attached to conflict?

A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.

Putting people in a room and strapping wires to their wrist to find out if I make them tingle when I'm telling them about Beirut is a long way from Edward R. Murrow.

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.

After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career — in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad — watching the people within those borders burn.

Who imagined that what I said upon my departure from Beirut would become a reality, when I said the volcano and typhoon which started in Beirut will not stop.

We runnin around in thousand-dollar clown suits, Better get some boots when Lucifer turn your city to Beirut.

As I searched the atlas for somewhere to run to, Hugh made a case for his old stomping grounds. His first suggestion was Beirut, where he went to nursery school. His family left there in the midsixties and moved to the Congo. After that, it was Ethiopia, and then Somalia, all fine places in his opinion. 'Let's save Africa and the Middle East for when I decide to quit living,' I said.

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.

My memories of Kabul are vastly different than the way it is when I go there now. My memories are of the final years before everything changed. When I grew up in Kabul, it couldn't be mistaken for Beirut or Tehran, as it was still in a country that's essentially religious and conservative, but it was suprisingly progressive and liberal.