Sunnis And Shiites Quotes & Sayings

There are no laurels in life, just new challenges. — Katharine Hepburn

In Ghazalia, Mr. Hussein showed his contempt for the majority Shiites in ways large and small. He refused to allow them even one mosque, while the Sunnis had nearly a dozen. To worship, the Shiites had to cross an inconveniently located bridge over the sewage canal to Shula. — Alex Berenson

Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me. — Trent Lott

What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. — Norman Schwarzkopf

Evil exists everywhere. Sometimes I think our limited senses are designed to protect us from awareness of its presence. We trust them to provide us with knowledge but it may be that they block out realization of horrors we cannot bear. — Robert Bloch

Sports can unify the Iraqi people - no Sunnis, no Shiites, just sport for the country. — Dana Hussein

...in the assassination of three of its first four caliphs, the "successors" to Mohammed and rulers of the faithful. Those early assassinations led to the split between Sunnis and Shiites, battle lines drawn fourteen centuries ago that US troops would encounter, and help reignite, in Iraq. There is no distinction between modern and ancient history in the Middle East. No region is more obsessed with its own past. Islam began as a force to be reckoned with, and Muslims have longed to return to their former glory. — Richard Engel

I think it's my job to like any character I play - to understand and appreciate a character, to look at the world as much as possible from their point of view. I don't look at it just technically: learn the lines, figure out what gestures I want to bring and play, and that's it. I like to learn as much as I can about the person, and see what happens. — Viggo Mortensen

ISIS wouldn't have existed without the US invasion of Iraq. It was born out of the Sunnis' feeling of alienation, their belief that they'd been pushed aside - which, of course, they had been. Sunnis suffered a thirteen-century-old injustice with power stripped from them by Washington and given to Iraqi Shiites and their coreligionists in Iran. This grievance is at the core of ISIS ideology. Simply put, no Iraq war, no ISIS. Two — Richard Engel

Life is stupidly short. Why not enjoy the last act? — Brian K. Vaughan

My time in the Middle East led me to realize that, with a few rare exceptions, the dominant political ideology there - whether you were talking about Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, Israelis, Arabs, Persians, Turks, or Palestinians - was "I am weak, how can I compromise? I am strong, why should I compromise?" The notion of there being "a common good" and "a middle ground" that we all compromise for and upon - not to mention a higher community calling we work to sustain - was simply not in the lexicon. — Thomas L. Friedman

We have a lot of goodness in this country. And we should promote it, but never through the barrel of a gun. We should do it by setting good standards, motivating people and have them want to emulate us. But you can't enforce our goodness, like the neocons preach, with an armed force. It doesn't work. — Ron Paul

The morning arrived the way Alice imagined a whisper would: in tendrils of gray and threads of gold, quietly, quietly. The sky was illuminated with great care and deliberation, and she leaned back to watch it bloom. — Tahereh Mafi

Let them get at the books themselves, and do not let them be flooded with diluted talk from the lips of their teacher. The less the parents 'talk-in' and expound their rations of knowledge and thought to the children they are educating, the better for the children ... Children must be allowed to ruminate, must be left alone with their own thoughts. — Charlotte Mason

The terrorists want civil war. Al-Qaida is attacking Shiites. The Shiite militias are taking revenge on the Sunnis. And the Sunnis are become more extremist, with some joining al-Qaida. — Zalmay Khalilzad

Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple. — David Shannon

The UN should arrange, as US forces leave, for an international group of peacekeepers and negotiators from the Arab countries to bring together Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and work out a solution for self-governance that would give all three groups a share in political power. Simultaneously, the UN should arrange for shipments of food and medicine, from the United States and other countries, as well as engineers to help rebuild the country. — Howard Zinn

My mother is a Shiite Muslim, as are most Iranians, while the rest of the
family was Sunni. But that was never a problem. Shiites and Sunnis had lived
side by side and intermarried for over a thousand years and our differences were
far fewer than our similarities. What was fundamental was that all Muslims,
regardless of their sects, surrender to the will of God, and believe that there is no
God but Allah and Mohammed is his last Prophet. That is the Quranic definition
of a Muslim and, in our family, what mattered most. — Benazir Bhutto

Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way. — Noah Feldman

I think that we live in a remarkably networked world. The problem with that, of course, is that tensions can travel in nanoseconds across the Internet, and so the tensions between Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad, or between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast - those show up in different parts of the world. — Eboo Patel

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. — Menachem Begin

Nation building is our central task, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And states, nations can't just be built with military power. Despite all difficulties, it's very inspiring to see how the Kurds, the Arab Sunnis and the Shiites are coming together here, how they're jointly defining the basis on which their state is to be built, the political course this state will pursue and who is to receive which cabinet positions. — Zalmay Khalilzad

The distinction between radical Islam and moderate Muslims is important, as are the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, and between militant and mystical Islam. — Walter Kasper

I wait and ache. — Sylvia Plath

Can there be greater foolishness than the respect you pay to people collectively when you despise them individually? — Marcus Tullius Cicero