Ahmet Ertegun Quotes

I feel like the history between Israel and Palestine has a lot in common with the history between India and Pakistan.

The death of Garang has unfortunately unleashed emotions of anger; some genuine, others cultivated by elements who wanted to pit one group of Sudanese against another.

I cannot accept a divide between Malagasy people and a civil war.

For some reason, I grew up generally believing that Japan and Korea were quite friendly. I do know that there is some bad history and the extremists on both sides are unreasonable.

the awakening of the Arab nation, and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Israel…. These movements are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins.

The Kurds were in the Middle East long before the Arabs.

If they don't behave themselves in the South, it will be shots across the border

… empires cannot be shattered and new states raised upon their ruins without disturbance. To create new boundaries is always to create new troubles. The one follows the other.

The racial antipathy of the Occidental for the Oriental, the fierce religious hatred of the Christian for the Mohammedan, are motives actuating the Balkan peoples to a degree inconceivable in America.

The reason there IS a Turkey and there ISN'T a Kurdistan is in all of history no Kurd could ever stand by any other Kurd long enough to hold off all the hungry Arabs, Persians, Turks, Brits and other sand carnivores swimming around the Fertile Crescent.

Some civil wars are caused by one group within a country seeking its independence, while in other cases, the civil war itself leads one group or another to seek its independence as the solution to its problems.

Rebellions broke out, from the full-scale political revolution of Dorr’s rebellion in Rhode Island to urban violence and protest, often by out of work whites taking out their anger on African Americans or Irish Americans. In response, leaders had to come to terms with the role of force in a democracy.

… the idea of nationality, has caused more damage to the economic system of Europe, however extraordinary that may seem, than the idea of plunder… The stumbling block is the difficulty of separating racial groups in Europe. Apart from the large countries where war, often prolonged for centuries, has cemented the nations, the races which fought for the possession of the continent--Latin, Teuton and Slav--have remained in conflict. They are still encamped upon the ground, always in a state of hostility, yet subject to interpenetration.

I love Israel, but I don't like it very much.

Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.

At a certain moment, Yugoslavia stopped being rational, and then you end up going to war.

The U.S. actions in Kosovo - carving out an independent state based on ethnicity from within a sovereign nation - provided the precedent for Russia to carve Crimea out of Ukraine.

Historically, the Balkans have been an incubator of war.

Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.

Putin could no more survive returning Crimea to Ukraine than Bibi Netanyahu could survive giving East Jerusalem back to Jordan.

When I was first named as Deputy Prime Minister, there was a feeling of shock that I should be chosen because I was labeled as being an ultra and very anti-Chinese.

Turkey must find its place if, of course, it can heal its internal sores, and none is more malignant than the perennial Kurdish issue.

In the Middle East, we don't have the luxury to indulge in fantasy.

'Madras Cafe' is set against the backdrop of the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1990s.

It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists.