When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States? Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden.

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.

The Americans may think they have 'liberated' Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty - seem to have a different idea what liberation means.

U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.

When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States? Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden.

President Bush will come here and there will be new "friends" of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who "liberated" them.

Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the "liberating" kind.

I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.

A businessman admits that he 'let go' an employee because he was a Sunni Muslim. You simply have to look after yourself, he explains. I am shocked, like a good Westerner should be.

And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.

Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt - got rid of them.

Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute - an illusion of course, but that's what Assad thought.

Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist.

I do not make stories up, full stop.

I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.

In one way, I fear all Damascus is a dungeon. Or do you have to live here to appreciate that?

Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too?

It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers.

One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to.

President Bush will come here and there will be new 'friends' of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who 'liberated' them.

Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the 'liberating' kind.

The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.

The Syrian army is tired of corruption. It is tired of party nepotism. It is becoming very angry with those it blames for the war.

The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.

The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez's interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar.

The word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.

We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.

When I visited Syrian special forces along the front lines, I was given extraordinary amounts of detail. They gave me the code numbers for the various positions they've got, told me where the rebels were - about 800 meters away in a forest. I met soldiers who had been wounded but were still serving.

One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize theyre being lied to.

Colleagues will malign you if youre a moderately successful journalist.

What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.

The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war.

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Dullness is the only crime for which an editor ought to be hung.

Success in crime always invites to worse deeds.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

Rather let the crime of the guilty go unpunished than condemn the innocent.

I will never have a drink and get behind the wheel of a car. It's not illegal to drink and drive, but there becomes a certain point where it does become a crime.

I think there's a lot of naivete and hubris within our mix of personalities. That's probably our worst crime. I keep wondering what a "mature" record means.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics.

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

Next to the love of God, the love of country is the best preventive of crime.