Ed Harris Quotes

Lebanon, of course, is a country with great problems. Traditionally, they have religious-national groups or ethnic-national groups. They have the Druses. Even the two Moslem sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites, are apart. Then they have the armed groups. Everybody's got a private army.

I asked myself what Palestinians would do if Israel disappeared-if everything not only went back to the way it was before 1948 but if all the Jewish people abandoned the Holy Land and were scattered again. And for the first time, I knew the answer. We would still fight. Over nothing. Over a girl without a head scarf. Over who was toughest and most important. Over who would make the rules and who would get the best seat.

The U.S. cannot force Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds to make peace or to act for the common good. They have been in conflict for 1,400 years.

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.

Northern Ireland still suffers from its past, and it will take generations to escape sectarianism and for violence to end totally. Nonetheless, it is in a different place now than during the Troubles, and it will not go back to the old days.

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.

It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.

When people are faced with a choice between the Northern Ireland they have got and the perfect Northern Ireland, they complain. But in the real world that isn't the choice.

Lebanon will be engulfed again in a huge power game that will last quite a long time. This is the tragic destiny of Lebanon.

The basis on which the Good Friday agreement was constructed was in addressing those problems in the history of Northern Ireland, the social and constitutional problems as well as the military problems that have been unaddressed for centuries.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.

Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA's prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.

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

I've never read anything set in Belfast that doesn't involve the Troubles or something senseless over a flag.

Why take sides in the fractious squabbles of a quarrelsome continent?

The only way to save our empires from the encroaching of the people is to engage in war, and thus substitute national passions for social aspirations.

The Middle East is so constructed that the rational things are the things least likely to occur.

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

If we must fight, then by God we will fight. And I hope they [the Croats and Bosnians] will not be so crazy as to fight against us. Because if we don’t know how to work well or to do business, at least we know how to fight well.

In the end, civil wars are about the distribution of power.

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

Aren’t any of us worried about certain people who are fighting holy wars against certain other people who do not believe what they believe.

The Republicans definitely want to fight. They are just not sure what they want to fight about.

I sleep soundly. It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence.

The Anglo-Irish of the Pale and the native Irish … hate one another as much as any two nations in the world ...