Oliver North Quotes

Telling families of hostages that the United States will not pay ransom is as tough as anything I do..

The United States government does not negotiate with terrorists.

I like what Abba Eban once said during the 1967 war. He said, "When all else fails, men turn to reason."

At the beginning, because the lives of the hostages were at stake, then during this silent period we have taken several measures like not accepting the ultimatum of the terrorists threatening to kill our foreign affairs minister.

We will fight hostage taking like we fight terrorism.

The clever, albeit fragile, coalition against terrorism brought together by the U.S. government might be able to advance the transition from classical international law to a cosmopolitan order.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

The Egyptian military and the government of Israel have long had a common interest in maintaining order and fighting terrorism in Sinai.

America faced its first hostage crisis in the Middle East… Thomas Jefferson was President and over 100 Americans were being held hostage by Arabs from the Barbary Coast and the Arabs believed that if they were killed, they would go immediately to heaven. 220 years later America is still facing the same problem.

Diplomats are only useful in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.

The best way to avoid hostages being taken in the future is to devalue the hostages that exist.

Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also chosen to be an enemy of civilization.

I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.

We are desperately in need of the kind of smart diplomacy that has worked for America in the past. If you use force, it should be a last resort. And it needs to be used with full understanding of the consequences.

The U.N. brings everybody together. And without it, we can't deal with Ebola or terrorism or climate change. But it's 70 years old. It's tired. It's acquired a lot of bad habits. And often it feels like only new bad habits get added and old bad habits don't get taken away.

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

I was elected prime minister in 2014 under incredibly difficult circumstances: A third of the country was overrun by terrorists, the economy was struggling, people were divided by sectarianism, and relations with the wider world were strained.

Since retiring from the FBI in 2007, I've traveled the world and worked with everyone from CEOs to their managers and everyday workers on how to apply techniques from hundreds of high-stakes, life-or-death negotiations to business negotiations.

This issue of terrorism is as much an issue for Pakistan as it is a Western issue.

I don't think Albert Einstein could have devised an equation to guide the leader of the free world during the wildly tumultuous post-9/11 realities without a modicum of help from the opposition party and the vast majority of the print and electronic media.

Democracies don't fight each other. Terrorists don't tend to come from places where they feel like they have recourse in a political system.

If Syria wants to be part of the international community, there are some conditions that they have to meet. And the first one is to stop embracing the terrorism.

I wanted to be a hostage negotiator.

A mercurial plan of action may have worked in the Trump Organization board room, but it's a disastrous tactic in foreign affairs.

In my years as the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator, I learned an important fundamental lesson: Hostage negotiation is often nothing more than a business transaction.