Yasser Arafat Quotes

Insurgencies have a way of going on for a long time historically.

To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.

There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Reality shows that, contrary to other countries in southern Africa, we have no basis for a classical guerilla struggle. We have never had a hinterland, and we do not expect to.

Guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by the few but dependent on the support of many.

An insurgency is the most difficult to fight of all military activities.

Insurgencies are nearly as old as warfare itself.

We want a full-scale, popular war of liberation to destroy the Zionist base in Palestine. The time has come to use these arms for the purpose for which they were created.

The borderline between guerrilla warfare and crime, between patriotism and terrorism, is often a very thin one.

Guerrilla troops, especially when supported by much of the population, [can] hold a colonial army at bay.

If we were fighting an army, the work would be comparatively easy. We are fighting a secret revolutionary organization.

Insurrection—by means of guerrilla bands—is the true method of warfare for all nations desirous of emancipating themselves from a foreign yoke

When you’re fighting [private] militias, you have to quash them.

I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for those people who fight to free themselves.

Since 1775, the average insurgency has lasted 7 years and since 1945 it has lasted 10 years.

I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off.

We want to end this misery of the Palestinian people in order for us really to live with dignity as human beings in an independent state side by side with the Israeli state.

This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra… Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us.

We don't kill Iraqis - our hands do not kill Iraqis. But we target only the occupier with all the means of resistance.

Freedom can be gained only at the point of an IRA rifle, and I apologize to no one for saying that we support the freedom fighters of the IRA.

The resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. This new group will be defined soon by me.

Talking about winning and losing is like if you're talking about two armies fighting on two territories, which is not the case. Those [terrorists] are gangs, coming from abroad, infiltrate inhabited areas, kill the people, take their houses, and shoot at the army. The army cannot do the same, and the army doesn't exist everywhere.

Self-ruled Taiwan cannot be expected to accept such an affront to the legitimacy of its government and the self-determination of the Taiwanese people.

Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.

Our resistance will be long and painful, but whatever the sacrifices, however long the struggle, we shall fight to the end, until Vietnam is fully independent and reunified.