Bashar al Assad

Lebanon was under Israeli occupation, up to its capital, but we did not consider that a disaster. Why? Because it was very clear that there are ways to resist.

The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy. If you want to go towards democracy, the first thing is to involve the people in decision making, not to make it.

Israel does not care about the international public opinion.

We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue.

Today, the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him, and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.

Is there an equality of power between America and Iraq? Definitely not; however, the Iraqi people are standing fast and are defending their land courageously.

The executive branch tries to follow policies of plausible deniability, which means that messages are given to the CIA to do things but without a paper trail, without a record. When the story comes out later it looks as if the CIA is doing things on their own.

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‘sophisticated’ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

To the extent that Trump’s programs are coherent, they fall into the same general category of those of Paul Ryan, who has granted us the kindness of spelling them out: increase spending on the military…and cut back taxes, mainly on the rich, with no new revenue sources.

I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that will be distributed equally throughout the world.

The option preferred by the privileged is for the fate of everyone else to be in the hands of insurance company executives whose goal, as Milton Friedman can explain, is to ensure maximum profit and market share: meaning the worst possible health care.

Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

As the Cold War came to a definitive end, the Bush Administration created a Center for Defense Trade to stimulate arms sales while proposing government guarantees of up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of US arms.

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That’s the way it’s done in the U.S., and that’s the way it’s done in Russia.

Don’t say “the White House wants.” Buildings can’t want.

Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one. … Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms.

Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.

There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.

We Marxists believe that revolution will occur in other countries, as well. But it will occur at a time when it will be considered possible or necessary by revolutionaries of those countries.

Every society is three meals away from chaos.