Top 266 Libya Quotes & Sayings

The situation in Syria is quite different from Libya.

There's more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we've published, just about Libya. It's not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of [Muammar] Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state - something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.

I'm going to be specific so you can render your verdict. Let's go to North Africa, she was the chief engineer of the disastrous overthrow of [Muamar] Qaddafi in Libya. Libya today after Hillary Clinton's grand strategy? Their economy's in ruins. There's death and violence on the streets, and ISIS is now dominating that country.

I think what Mr. Trump has made clear is that he would not undertake optional wars, what I have called wars of choice, a la, say Iraq in 2003 or Libya, for the purposes of transforming another country. It's not clear whether Hillary Clinton, if she were to have the opportunity, would do such a thing again or whether she would have taken a - the lesson from both Iraq and Libya that we ought not to be undertaking those kinds of wars of choice.

In late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

Libya as a country is a relatively new concept. The period of Libya as a modern nation really starts after World War II.

Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa - previously people fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by [Muammar] Gaddafi: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened.

The government of Libya announced the death of Moammar Gadhafi. This marks the end of a long and painful chapter for the people of Libya, who now have the opportunity to determine their own destiny in a new and democratic Libya. The Gadhafi regime ruled the Libyan people with an iron fist. The enormous potential of the Libyan people was held back and terror was used as a political weapon. The last major regime strongholds have fallen. The new government is consolidating the control over the country. And one of the world's longest-serving dictators is no more.

If you look at Libya, I was deeply concerned about what would happen after Qaddafi was gone.

Libya is a failed state and becoming a launching pad for external operations, as is Sinai in Egypt.

In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map, Libya was stable, Egypt was peaceful, Iraq was seeing really a big, big reduction in violence, Iran was being choked by sanctions, Syria was somewhat under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region and the entire world. Libya is in ruins and our ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos. Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons.

Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.

The president of the United States let the consulate in Libya become a death trap.

I see Libya as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and a sovereign State of the nearly 200 members of the United Nations.

I will return to Libya and undertake my duties and obligations to bring equality within the chaos.

One of the things that has been very difficult in Libya is the sense of uncertainty - the sense that they haven't actually finished the revolution, that there was still a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty has made Libya harder for business in terms of oil and other things as well.

I am longing to see Libya rejoin the world as the internationalist Mediterranean country that it was.

I am a Bedouin warrior who brought glory to Libya and will die a martyr.

I do not honestly know what is really happening in Libya at the moment but it must be very hard for Gaddafi and his family.

In the 38th chapter of Ezekiel, it says that the land of Israel will come under attack by the armies of the ungodly nations, and it says that Libya will be among them. Do you understand the significance of that? Libya has now gone Communist, and that's a sign that the day of Armageddon isn't far off.

Faced with the potential of mass atrocities and a call for help from the Libyan people, the United States and our friends and allies stopped Gadhafi's forces in their tracks. A coalition that included the United States, NATO and Arab nations persevered to protect Libyan civilians. So this is a momentous day in the history of Libya. The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted, and with this enormous promise the Libyan people now have a great responsibility: to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Gadhafi's dictatorship.

We pulled out of Libya. Now look what's happened: a safe haven, a vacuum, ISIS training militants to hit in Tunisia.

The committee accepts that, as the government response suggests, U.K. policy in Libya was initially driven by a desire to protect civilians. However, we do not accept that it understood the implications of this, which included collapse of the state, failure of stabilization and the facilitation of Islamist extremism in Libya.

We're not getting involved in terms of sending ground forces into Libya. Let's be clear about that. And indeed the UN Resolution forbids that. It says no foreign occupation of any part of Libya.

Defeating terrorism in Libya can only be achieved through the political and institutional determination of a united Libyan government, which will need the strong and unequivocal support from the international community in confronting the myriad challenges facing Libya.

I was opposed to the U.S. involvement in Libya from the very start. President Obama has never made a compelling national security case on Libya.

Libya is a huge disaster.

Let's go back to the beginning of the Obama administration, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama led NATO in toppling the government in Libya. They did it because they wanted to promote democracy. A number of Republicans supported them. Well, the result is, Libya is now a terrorist war zone run by jihadists.

President Chavez has always been a loyal friend of Gaddafi, assassinated in the crudest way possible. Europe should think about the bombings and the destruction of Libya that filled the country with terrorists. Who's truly ruling Libya's military and sending thousands of armed men to fight in Syria? It's Al Qaeda.

We put our fingers in the eyes of those who doubt that Libya is ruled by anyone other than its people.

[John] Bolton was an advocate for regime change in Libya, so was Hillary Clinton actually. And Donald Trump said it was a mistake. I agree it was a mistake to do regime change in Libya. We became more endangered and actually worse people took over afterwards.

On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.'

Al Qaeda is alive and well in Libya, Iraq, Syria and the wars are not receding.

Hillary Clinton failed to mention that her agreement with a precipitous withdrawal and declaration of victory in 2011 helped left swaths of territory and weaponry from ISIS. She failed to mention that she described Bashar al-Assad as a positive reformer and opened an American embassy. She failed to mention a complete failure strategy in Libya, which now is enabling ISIS to move into Libya.

I think the debate was really some powerful moments of clarity. We saw that Donald Trump, substantively, has the same issues on issue after issue as Hillary Clinton. He agreed with Hillary Clinton on Libya, toppling the government in Libya. That led directly to Benghazi, led to handing that country over to radical Islamic terrorism.

Once the U.S. and NATO walked away from Libya, a chaotic, lawless state in the soft underbelly of Europe arose.

Libya is still a mess right now.

I have been to Libya and walked the streets of Benghazi myself.

My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.

There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet.

Foreign policy is painstakingly difficult, and if there is to be anything gained from the experience in Libya, it is how not to conduct world affairs.

The White House is the leakiest place I've ever been in. (On special measures to ensure secrecy of plans to bomb Libya)

Clinton appears to be the sole holdout in the Obama administration in understanding the catastrophe caused by its foreign policy in Libya.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

The chaotic situation in Libya is definitely creating a threat. Libya now connects the jihadists in Africa with those in the Middle East and in Afghanistan. This could have been avoided.

As has been pointed out with Libya, the debate over Libya, sometimes we allow diplomatic relations with imperfect regimes because progress can best be made through engagement instead of isolation.

Fortunately in Libya, there's only a few cities on the coast, because most of Libya is a desert. The fact of the matter is, we absolutely have to be - and not just with special forces - I mean, that's not going to work. Come on, you've got to go back to the invasion, when we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We have to be there on the ground in significant numbers. We do have to include our Muslim Arab friends to work with us on that. And we have to be in the air. And we - it should be a broad coalition made up of the kinds of people that were involved when we defeated Saddam.

I think it is absolutely correct to solve the problem of terrorism in Iraq and Syria and Libya.

There is an intention to colonise Libya. And this makes the Libyan people want to fight the new colonisation by the West.

This [U.S.] bombing in Libya. So what are we doing in Libya? We just dropped some bombs on someone who we found is a leader there, maybe we killed some group attending a leadership meeting. Does this mean the problem is going to go away? No. It means we're going to have worse guys.

In view of the mess left behind by the French and ourselves, we cannot simply leave Libya alone.

When your economy is subject to the whims of Libya and Nigeria and Venezuela, you have a problem.

Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa - previously people fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe', and this is exactly what happened.

I think that it’s premature to call Libya a democracy because political order is still so fragile there and the command by the state over the means of violence is still so inadequate that I think state building remains a major challenge. And until the militias can be reined in and the authority of the democratically-elected state can really be firmly established, there’s still tremendous fragility and vulnerability in the unfolding story in Libya.

The United States is sending its most powerful drone to Libya. That’s a long trip for Joe Biden.

When Qadhafi was in Libya, he was the major supporter of rebel groups in Sudan. So when the revolution came to Libya, we supported it.

China gets their oil from Libya. Why isn't China involved? They're going out spending billions of dollars a day on trying to take over the world economically. And we're spending billions and billions and billions of dollars on policing the world. Why isn't China involved with Libya? That - we don't get oil from Libya, China does.

We know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution. (On Muammar Qaddafi of Libya)

I visited Libya in September 1996 for the 27th anniversary of the 'revolution' - a military coup that a 27-year-old Gadhafi led to topple the monarchy and since which he has ruled. Some were optimistic that Gadhafi's 'revolution' could herald a new Libya, but it didn't take long for his brutality to stamp out any such hopes.

Libyans have to work together for a new Libya. They should keep in place the sinews of security.