Robert Fisk

“There is nothing so satisfying as to be shot at without effect.”

“U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.”

“Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the 'liberating' kind.”

“The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.”

“The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.”

“A businessman admits that he 'let go' an employee because he was a Sunni Muslim. You simply have to look after yourself, he explains. I am shocked, like a good Westerner should be.”

“The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.”

“I do not make stories up, full stop.”

“President Bush will come here and there will be new 'friends' of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who 'liberated' them.”

“I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.”

“I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'”

“Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist.”

“Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute - an illusion of course, but that's what Assad thought.”

“William Dalrymple called me a war junkie in his silly book. No, I don't have a desire for it. I'm appalled and infuriated by it.”

“Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt - got rid of them.”

“It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers.”

“One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to.”

“Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too?”

“We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.”

“The word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.”