Peter Landesman Quotes

The trading of arms is disgusting and contributes to horrors around the world.

This mass destructive weapons were sold to Iraqi government by the United States. And Mr. Rumsfeld has been one of the man responsible for this sale, for this bargain, for this market.

Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade. We see it in the suffering of civilian populations trapped by armed conflict or pervasive crime. We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians - including children, the most vulnerable of all.

I think that Donald Trump is the most dangerous politician I’be ever encountered, and I did a campaign against a guy in the Congo who got accused of war crimes in the Hague. If that guy would have won, he wouldn’t have had nuclear weapons.

One of the biggest problems that Egypt faces is the lack of border security - the importation of weapons on their way to Gaza, for example, coming out of Sudan.

There is a basic failure to understand the Israeli condition in its complexity. On the one hand Israel is really intimidated [threatened with extinction] like no other industrial democracy, On the other hand, it is an occupying power. People on the left … usually concentrate on occupation and ignore intimidation. People on the right concentrate on intimidation and ignore occupation. The truth is we have to wrestle with both

If you’re going to be involved with espionage, you’ve got to be motivated. It’s not fun and games. It’s dirty and dangerous. There’s always the chance that you’re going to get burned.

Such a weapon [the proposed Hydrogen Bomb] goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.

To have you turn your searchlight on Washington politics is better than anything our guardian angel could do for us—on earth at least.

I believe there is nothing which can be done to restrain these frivolous Presidential expenditures because Mobutu has apparently risen in soufflé-like grandiloquence…. to call his attention to the dangers of this type of thing … would be to incur instant wrath…. It is the most serious problem facing Congo at present time and the fault is that of the President [Mobuto] and the uncontrollable spending is coming from him.

Egypt has a population of 90 million. If this country fails, the whole region will slide into a cycle of anarchy that will represent a grave danger to all countries in this region, including Israel, and would extend to Europe.

We are deeply disturbed by reports of today's airstrike on a funeral hall in Yemen, which, if confirmed, would continue the troubling series of attacks striking Yemeni civilians. U.S. security cooperation with Saudi Arabia is not a blank check. Even as we assist Saudi Arabia regarding the defense of their territorial integrity, we have and will continue to express our serious concerns about the conflict in Yemen and how it has been waged. In light of this and other recent incidents, we have initiated an immediate review of our already significantly reduced support to the Saudi-led Coalition and are prepared to adjust our support...

I'm a little disappointed in what's happened. I'm beginning to lose faith in Obama. This Syria thing is ridiculous. He should not be drawing red lines.

No one else will really care, but I missed the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Also the war in Chechnya.

Yemen is one of the most dangerous spots in the world.

Syria is important because it lies at the heart of a region critical to U.S. security, a region that is home to friends and partners and one of our closest allies. It is important because the Syrian regime possesses stores of chemical weapons that they have recently used on a large scale and that we cannot allow to fall into terrorists' hands.

Does the global Left - as well as the Israeli Left - truly not care about the horrific Taliban regime, the terrible oppression of women in Gulf states, and the mass hanging festivals in Iran?

It's a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

One should also remember that the U.S. is the biggest exporter of torture weapons in the world, though the U.K. is not far behind in the league table. We never stopped, even under Robin Cook's supposedly ethical foreign policy.

Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.

What we get in the States is a pro-Palestinian point of view.

No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this.

On Putin's order, Russia intervenes in Syria not to fight terrorists but to abet the war crimes of the Assad regime. Russian bombers deliberately target aid workers and hospitals. They threaten Syrian freedom fighters trained by the U.S. They are allied with our enemies in the Middle East and trying to weaken our friendships there.

I grew up in Saudi Arabia and India and Cyprus, and I lived in a war-zone myself, and, I mean, I had a pretty bizarre, I guess, nomadic childhood, and so I was really drawn to international relations and political science.