Top 87 Shia Quotes & Sayings

I would trade places with Michael Bay when he was directing 'Transformers' because I'd get to meet Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, and also see what it's like to direct a huge action movie. That'd be awesome.

Religious distinctions are deeply important for many of the problems in today's Middle East, particularly between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Syria and Iraq.

I actually went to an arts middle school with Shia LaBeouf, but even there, I was one of the weirder kids.

I'd love to have a career like McConaughey or Shia LaBeouf - I love him in everything he's done. Despite his celebrity status, he's such a human being.

Syria is a multi-confessional state: in addition to Sunni and Shia Muslims, there are Alawites, Orthodox and other Christian confessions, Druzes, and Kurds.

Muqtada leads the only real mass movement in Iraq. It's a mass movement of the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population, and of poor Shia - and most Shia are poor. Otherwise the place is full of sort of self-declared leaders, many of whom spend most of their time outside Iraq.

I felt it was a privilege that I came from such a rich background. I had the best of both worlds. My mother was a Shia Muslim, while my father was a janoi-clad man. He never pretended to be secular.

You know, since the 6th century, Sunni and Shia have been fighting.

If the Sunni and Shia, or those nations that surround Saudi Arabia and those nations that gather around Tehran or Iran fight each other, that is the trigger that will bring about the War of Armageddon.

As we used to say when I was privileged to be the commander there, Nineveh province has the most diverse human terrain in all of Iraq - Sunni Arab majority to be sure, but also Shia Arabs, numerous Kurdish communities, and they are broken out into several different political parties.

I'm worried about the world because there's chaos in the Middle East, and I think the Iranian deal [to lift sanctions] is going to continue the Shia-Sunni battles, the Persian-Arab battles.

Shia LaBeouf? His style is crazy.

I read Holes in 10th grade, and I havent read a full book since. The movie version with Shia LaBeouf was OK, but the book was way better.

Fourth, we will continue providing humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.

This current government in Iraq has never fulfilled the commitments it made to form a unity government with the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shia. We have worked hard with them within the confines of our ability to do that but we can't dictate to them.

Unfortunately, the source of all this conflict between the Sunnis and Shia is some major powers that do not want religious unity amongst Muslims.

To move any regime you need to have co-operation and co-ordination between Kurds, Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, the people and the army. Until we have this we cannot change the regime.

The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.

I started out as a writer with an hour removed from Kingdom of Heaven. You have to make one print for the entire world, and that's something that influences the theatrical cuts of pictures to an enormous degree. It's a reality. You can't have one cut for the Sunni, and one for the Shia, and one each for Tories, Whigs, vegetarians, one cut for the Cineplex, and one for literary intellectuals.

Shia [LaBeouf] was great. He's just high energy. He's into really playing, and I had to be on my toes in a way that I wasn't necessarily expecting.

There is a difference between Iraq, where you have Sunni, Shia, and Kurds put together after the First World War by the Western powers. It doesn't work. It needs to break up into three parts.

'Holes' was my favorite book ever. So you know when you love a book and you hear it's being made into a movie and it makes you a little annoyed at first? But I would've loved to play the Shia LaBeouf role in that movie when I was younger. I just wanted to be the rebellious kid on the old digging camp.

I am Shia Muslim.

The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.

Right, because they're looking at also organizing the Sunni tribes up around Mosul to take back that city as well. That's the second largest city in Iraq. That's going to be a very, very tough fight. And the Shia militias were not used in Ramadi, and we're told by the Iraqi generals that they don't want any Shia militias up in Mosul, either, to take back that city. So - but again, that's going to be a very, very tough fight.

And on this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular.

Comedians are always going to be in the showbiz middle class, you're not Brad Pitt; you're never going to be Sam Rockwell or Shia LaBeouf or Leo DiCaprio. You're a comic.

I was in a Rite Aid... and fell into a Christmas tree display. None other than Shia LaBeouf helped me out of it.

Turkey is saying that it wants to preserve Sunni dominance in Mosul. Obviously, there, the Kurds, the Shia, the Iraqi government have their own agendas.

The Sunnis no longer recognize the centralized government as a legitimate power. The Shia militia that is moving around is calling out war crimes that are anti-Sunni. So, the Sunnis are in a tough spot. Do they move to an ISIS, which is a radical Islamic terrorist organization? Or do they defend themselves? Or do they give up?

The Iranian regime should know that we will hold them accountable for any actions that their Shia militias take in Iraq.

I was a big fan of Shia LaBeouf and 'Even Stevens' and was like, 'Oh, man. I would love to be on Disney Channel and have a show,' because it was what I watched.

The reason that ISIL was so successful, yes, it had to do with their capabilities and prowess on the battlefield, but they were dealing with a receptive constituency in northern Iraq because of the intense hatred of the Maliki government, which of course is imposing the Shia view on them.

Certain Gulf Arabs support proxy jihadist Sunni groups such as al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, while Iran supports Shia militant forces such as Hezbollah.

Iran has interest in seeing that the Shia population of Iraq basically adhere to a line that comes from Iran.

Just a few thousand Hezbollah fighters set two countries on fire all by themselves. Don't discount what bloody mayhem and hell a few thousand armed Druze, Christians, and Sunni can do if they decide to go hunting Shia in revenge for destroying their country.

I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.

We're seeing Iran now through the Shia militias in Iraq. We're seeing Iran in Syria; we know the Quds Force is in there.

We are engaging in the diplomatic efforts that are required within Iraq among the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurd, among friends, like Egypt, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but also enemies like Iran and Syria. They have to have buy-in into that process.

The president [Barack Obama] is not willing to send in apaches and spotters if the Iraqis say they don't want them and if it means that these Shia mobilization forces are going to be going after and trying to kill Americans.

I was so lucky to be working with amazing actors like Shia and Evan and James Buckley and Mads Mikkelsen and Rupert Grint and Til Schweiger and those guys, so you really want to make sure that they, that I don't have to shut off the camera because I'm running out of film or it becomes too expensive.

[A conflict of Sunni vs. Shia] is in the mind of the Saudis, and this is in the minds of the Wahabists. [The Iranians] actually what they are doing is the opposite. They tried to open channels with the Saudi, with many other Islamic entities in the region in order to talk about Islamic society, not Sunni and Shi'ite societies.

Today, the Muslim world is injured and corrupt. People who are the enemies of all Muslims are trying to cause disunity in the Islamic world by intensifying ethnic difference and separating people under names such as 'Shia and Sunni', 'Arabs and non-Arabs'.

The politicized version of Shia Islam that we see in the Islamic Republic post-1979 clearly is very conservative, but, there are other things one could say about Ayatollah Khomeini's concept of a Shia state because that in itself is a blasphemy as far as most Shia clerics are concerned. There's a theory that he developed in the early 1960s in the town of Najaf talking about - well not liberalism, necessarily, but flexibility though.

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.

But from the moment George Bush decided to overthrow Saddam, the people who were going to benefit here were the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population. So if you were ever going to have an election, then the Shia would take over.

The Iraqi government and most Iraqis understand that they have to bring back the Sunni Arab 20, 25 percent of the population. It won't work with these Shia militias running amok in these areas.

I think indeed our response on counterinsurgency needs to be finely tuned to the needs of Afghanistan. This is not Iraq. We don't have a Sons of Iraq here. We don't have the same divisions here that we had between Sunni and Shia.

I've lived in Egypt among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia.

As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body.

It is not coincidental that for so-called religious fundamentalists - whether they are Western or Eastern, Muslim or Christian - rigid male dominance and "holy wars" are priorities. Or that competing sects of the same religion, such as Sunni and Shia, are at each other's throats. In these cultures, women are rigidly controlled by men.

I read 'Holes' in 10th grade, and I haven't read a full book since. The movie version with Shia LaBeouf was OK, but the book was way better.

I always love watching those natural actors like Bill Cosby, Raven-Symone and Shia LaBeouf - just effortless actors.

Shia phobia or Sunni phobia...we never hear about this. They murder each other!

Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS' ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don't precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.

This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias, or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight.

I know that Shia LaBeouf and Fiona Apple went to my alma mater, Hamilton High.

A desire to contain extremism is a major reason why Putin offered help to the United States in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. It is also why Russia maintains close relations with Shia Iran, which acts as a counterweight to Sunni powers.

I never thought that I'd be dancing with Shia LaBeouf. When I heard he was going to be my partner, I was like, 'Does he even dance?' He doesn't, really, but he's such a sweet person.

Young Shia who have been brought up with nothing, who are pretty anarchic, pretty dangerous. In 2004 when they came close to killing me, and of course they have killed very large numbers of other Iraqis. That's a major source of strength for Muqtada.