Famous Quotes & Sayings

Scott Anderson Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 60 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Scott Anderson.

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Famous Quotes By Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1862644

If wells are constructed right and operated right, hydraulic fracturing will not cause a problem. ... Our natural gas supplies would plummet precipitously without hydraulic fracturing. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 315247

The principle of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the practice of polygamy. While denying the charge in public, by 1843 Smith had shared a revelation with his closest disciples. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 860034

All of this would quickly make military considerations in the Middle East subordinate to political ones, and move the decision-making process away from military officers in the field to diplomats and politicians huddled in staterooms. If the chief distinguishing characteristic of the former had been their ineptitude, at least their intent had been clear; with the rise of the statesmen, and with different power blocs jockeying for advantage, all was about to become shrouded in treachery and byzantine maneuver. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 682692

Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated - indeed, feverishly nurtured - by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1272936

To stay in Djemal's good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having assumed the consular duties of most all the European "belligerent" nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1641770

Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1693391

By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1336873

For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war's end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo valley, resulting in some 600,000 Italian casualties. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1074080

What the Fed is really trying to say is that it doesn't know what it is going to do next. And if the markets abhor anything, it is uncertainty. Expect bond and stock market volatility to increase from here until the inflation outlook solidifies. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1407598

He wasn't sure what to do. If he left the rock, it would only take a few minutes of desert air to dry his pool, and then all that would remain of him would be a small crucible of brown powder, a powder the wind would find and scatter. He wished to stay there, to protect the pool.
But after a time, he thought differently. He understood that if he stayed upon the rock, he would simply disappear as well. And so, he rose. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1255508

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 99010

Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct
a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion and
urgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect
its religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish Holy
Land of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades made
right. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1956554

Pain is always preferable to numbness. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1743470

Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along? — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 907775

Better a thousand times the Arab untouched. The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 234814

Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1136867

Waitresses, soldiers, rickshaw drivers, old ladies selling vegetables - my father would schmooze anybody. He was Clintonesque before the word existed. And, of course, it paid dividends. Ill-tempered guards at the most notorious border crossings waved him through with cheery smiles. Haughty maitre d's fawned over him. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1710067

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: 'The Great Loot.' — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1667999

As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially CIA guys. Maybe they're just really good at playing stupid, but I don't think so. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 2220582

Germany. If Churchill imagined, however, that a living Lawrence might have played a signal role in meeting that danger, he was surely mistaken. As Lawrence himself had been trying to tell the world for many years, the — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 2167234

Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1297914

But defeating one's enemies is only half the game; for a war to be truly justifiable one has to materially gain. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 2153219

Had worked so hard to bring about, that Lawrence was suddenly — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 2049243

Over the course of his wartime service, Lawrence was awarded a number of medals and ribbons, but with his profound disdain for such things, he either threw them away or never bothered to collect them. He made an exception in the case of the Croix de Guerre; after the war, according to his brother, he found amusement in placing the medal around the neck of a friend's dog and parading it through the streets of Oxford. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1486346

Mold - William Henry Yale also subscribed to Roosevelt's notions of the ideal American man and of the dangers of "over-civilization," code for effeminacy. The true man, in this worldview, was a rugged individualist, physically fit as well as intellectually cultured, as equally at home leading men into battle or shooting big game on the prairie as chatting with the ladies in the salon. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1632010

This must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy's life-line and of protecting our own." By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially "accessories to the crime," that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been given no alternative but to await another assault on the Suez Canal, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line - the narrow front of southern Palestine - an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 2048015

The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1848030

Just as with homicide, those in the 'passion' category of suicide are much more likely to turn to whatever means are immediately available - those that are easy and quick. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1679131

On top of this was the official indigenous Egyptian government that, though it was quite toothless, various British officials periodically felt the need to pretend to consult in order to maintain the appearance that the wishes of the actual inhabitants of Egypt somehow mattered. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1965618

What if I were to have you hanged?" In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, "Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America." Djemal apparently liked that answer. Before the ending of their meeting, he had appointed Aaronsohn inspector in chief of a new locust eradication program, — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1750601

Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East-that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away-were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1779444

And for all concerned there was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of "free trade," the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1821514

My father suffered from chronic wanderlust. When I was 14, he set out on a yearlong road trip across Europe and Asia - and decided to take me along for company. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1936910

For the next ninety years, the vast and profligate Saudi royal family would survive by essentially buying off the doctrinaire Wahhabists who had brought them to power, financially subsidizing their activities so long as their disciples directed their jihadist efforts abroad. The most famous product of this arrangement was to be a man named Osama bin Laden. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 722936

LATE ONE NIGHT in early October 1913, William Yale lay in his tent in the mountains of Anatolia, struck by a sense of wonder at how quickly a life could change. Just three weeks earlier he had been living in — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 143664

To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls - deceptions, in a less charitable assessment - to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 167488

The British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment - whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three - to the world's less fortunate cultures and races. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 216864

You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come. T. E. LAWRENCE, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, 1916 — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 361929

In keeping with original Mormon teachings, much of the property in Hildale and Colorado City is held in trust for the church. Striving to be as self-sufficient as possible, the community grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and everyone, including children, is expected to help bring in the yield. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 447919

What Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical to the notion of leading a heroic life. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 500390

Lawrence argued that despite posing as Islamic reformists "with all the narrow minded bigotry of the puritan," ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists were hardly representative of Islam. Instead, as he warned in "The Politics of Mecca," the Wahhabist sect was composed of marginal medievalists, "and if it prevailed, we would have in place of the tolerant, rather comfortable Islam of Mecca and Damascus, the fanaticism of Nejd ... intensified and swollen by success. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 526529

Was a master of the PowerPoint presentation nearly a century before it existed. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 562889

Even if he was happier in Asia than he'd been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father's insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of him sitting in his armchair in the evenings, poring over atlases the way other fathers read newspapers or books. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 585985

Back in February 1915, when the plan had first been scuttled, Lawrence had bitterly suggested to his family that France was the true enemy in Syria. In the wake of the second scuttling in November 1915 was born an enmity that would cause him to view all future French actions in the region with utter distrust. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 587158

As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements ... a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 688147

It seems to me that we are rather in the position of the hunters who divided up the skin of the bear before they had killed it. I personally cannot foresee the situation in which we may find ourselves at the end of the war, and I therefore think that any discussion at the present time of how we are going to cut up the Turkish Empire is chiefly of academic interest. BRITISH GENERAL GEORGE MACDONOGH, DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, JANUARY 7, 1916 — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 691081

He found a scene very much as Yale described, although, in his more accomplished hand, the macabre details would be far more graphically rendered: rats had gnawed "wet red galleries" into the bodies of the dead, many of which "were already swollen twice or thrice life-width, their fat heads laughing with black mouth. ... Of others the softer parts were fallen in. A few had burst open, and were liquescent with decay." Venturing deep into — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1220843

The peculiarities of my childhood, of constantly moving through so many different cultures, of always being the outsider, may have made me extraordinarily self-sufficient, but it had also bred a certain detachment, a sense that the world was a place to explore rather than truly inhabit. This manifested as a kind of shyness, even timidity. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 787304

Amid the American military "surge" in Iraq in 2006, the U.S. commander in chief, General David Petraeus, ordered his senior officers to read Twenty-Seven Articles so that they might gain clues on winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Presumably skipped over was Lawrence's opening admonition that his advice applied strictly to Bedouin - about 2 percent of the Iraqi population - and that interacting with Arab townspeople "require[s] totally different treatment. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 840350

Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 930961

Mark Sykes exemplified another characteristic common among the British ruling class of the Edwardian age, a breezy arrogance that held that most of the world's messy problems were capable of neat solution, that the British had the answers to many of them, and that it was their special burden - no less tiresome for being God-given - to enlighten the rest of humanity to that fact. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 954523

Nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1004148

[A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades
no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1022231

Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend's army go in return for one million English pounds' worth of gold. If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he'd very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1030578

The one possibility that Sanders tended to discount entirely was a landing at Gallipoli's southern tip, simply because the most basic rules of military logic - even mere common sense - argued against it. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1039885

So many times in the history of Mormon polygamy, the outside world thought it had the movement on the ropes only to see it flourish anew. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1080689

History is often the tale of small moments - chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence - that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly's wings that triggers a hurricane. — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1106978

It was all a construct that Lawrence's biographers - at least those in the lionizing camp - have been more than willing to accept. Yet in doing so they have glided past one of the most important and fascinating riddles of T. E. Lawrence's life. How was it that a man less than four months in Arabia had come to so identify with the Arab cause that he was willing to betray the secrets of his own nation to assist it, to in effect transfer his allegiance from his homeland to a people he still barely knew? — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1195114

His son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with sadistic inclinations - which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British - — Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson Quotes 1219990

British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance. — Scott Anderson