Kai Bird Quotes & Sayings

since the security hearing, he nevertheless no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to fight against the "cruelty" of indifference. In that sense, Rabi had been right: "They — Kai Bird

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. — Kai Bird

tea was served every afternoon between three and four in the Common Room on the main floor of Fuld Hall. "Tea is where we explain to each other," Oppenheimer once said, "what we don't understand. — Kai Bird

I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians. — Kai Bird

By any definition, what happened in Bhutan in the years 1989-93 was ethnic cleansing. The Bhutanese government denies this and has refused to repatriate any of those forcibly expelled. — Kai Bird

Khalid al-Hassan, the PLO's virtual foreign minister at the time, later explained to the British journalist Alan Hart, "I was opposed to the playing of the terror card. But I have to tell you something else. Those of our Fatah colleagues who did turn to terror were not mindless criminals. They were fiercely dedicated nationalists who were doing their duty as they saw it. I have to say they were wrong, and did so at the time, but I have also to understand them. In their view, and in this they were right, the world was saying to us Palestinians, 'We don't give a damn about you, and we won't care at least until you are a threat to our interests.' In reply those in Fatah who turned to terror were saying, 'Okay, world. We'll play the game by your rules. We'll make you care!' — Kai Bird

IN 1959, Oppenheimer attended a conference in Rheinfelden, West Germany, sponsored by the Congress on Cultural Freedom. He and twenty other world-renowned intellectuals gathered in the luxurious Saliner Hotel on the banks of the Rhine near Basel to discuss the fate of the Western industrialized world. Safe in this cloistered environment, Oppenheimer broke his silence on nuclear weapons and spoke with uncharacteristic clarity about how they were seen and valued in American society. "What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life," he asked, but "which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms? — Kai Bird

Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. "Rutherford wouldn't have me," Oppenheimer recalled. "He didn't think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar. — Kai Bird

periodic bouts of depression. Some of these episodes were brought on by his family's — Kai Bird

When Pais explained his mission, Einstein chuckled loudly, and then said, "The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him - the United States government. . . . [T]he problem was simple: All Oppenheimer needed to do was go to Washington, tell the officials that they were fools, and then go home. — Kai Bird

As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer's ordeal signified that the postwar "messianic role of the scientists" was now at an end. — Kai Bird

I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv. — Kai Bird

The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as 'the Jewish state.' — Kai Bird

In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy - the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy - had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Afterwards, — Kai Bird

He was always very kind and considerate to anybody below him," recalled Harold Cherniss. "But not at all to people who might be considered his intellectual equals. And this, of course, irritated people, made people very angry, and made him enemies." Wendell — Kai Bird

The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance. — Kai Bird

house at Otowi Bridge. — Kai Bird

Bhutan is a beautiful place. High-end tourists love it. — Kai Bird

the relations were of a — Kai Bird

One can't live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors. — Kai Bird

Palestinian guerrillas, in a bold and coordinated action, created this newest crisis Sunday, and in doing so they accomplished what they set out to do: they thrust back into the world's attention a problem diplomats have tended to shunt aside in hesitant steps towards Middle East peace. — Kai Bird

Although I went to college in the United States - Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota - I returned to the Middle East for a year in 1970-71 to study at the American University of Beirut. — Kai Bird

Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar-American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations - these were all ideas of the progressive left. — Kai Bird

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism. — Kai Bird

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism. — Kai Bird