Harri Holkeri Quotes

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

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

Holy War for the Preservation of the Faith in Ireland

It was the British who defined religion to divide and rule. That is what created the heat. That is what created the cut. Partition happened because of the rulers, fueled by a few powerful families on both sides who stood to gain. It is the politicians that keep everyone fighting.

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

We in the Middle East like to talk politics, we like to argue. Just look at the three prophets - Moses, Jesus and Mohammad. They are all from this small region which creates problems all the time.

As I told Piers Morgan, 'Catholics have confession, whereas Northern Irish Protestants only have interviews.'

The egotistical Mohammed, to serve his own ends, revised history to discredit known events in order to unite the descendants of Hagar, a slave, who bore Abram his son Ishmael; a child who was not to be of the covenant. In a sense Mohammed was the forerunner of the Protestant pick-and-choose mentality that is now running rampant even in the Catholic Church

The end of the Cold War unfroze religion and ethnicity as violent forces…

… the strangest sight in the world—two races hating one another for the love of God

To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.

in their ideal forms nation and empire stand at opposite ends of a political spectrum, but in the actuality of history they influenced, reinforced, and undermined one another at different times and in different ways.

The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.

I must try desperately to absorb all information I can about the Middle East. I want to excel. I want to speak articulately about the politics of the Middle East and its religion.

First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.

Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.

I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well.

With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.

So, this war is against the Islam that the West does not control.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

All my adult life, there was the Troubles. That was the backdrop of my life.