Hanan Ashrawi Quotes

I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

I don't need power at the cost of spilled blood.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

Why do people want to kill and maim and pillage? We're all in it together.

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

The mad, cruel, and accursed American war.

I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human.

It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

No one will have mercy on those who cannot defend themselves in the Middle East.

We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands.... Is not Life miserable enough, comes not death soon enough without resort to the hideous enginery of War? People of the U.S.! Your rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity! Why sleep you thoughtless on its verge, as though this was not your business?

Nothing endurable can be produced on a soil soaked with blood and moved by violent agitations.

War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history