Charles Glass > Quotes

“The population of Syria is so inharmonious a gathering of widely different races in blood, in creed, and in custom, that government is both difficult and dangerous.”— Sir Mark Sykes, Dar Ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey (1904)”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“When he did not answer, his enemies took their revenge. On October 2, 2011, his twenty-two-year-old son Sariya and one of his professors were driving from their university in the countryside to Aleppo when armed men fired on their car and killed both men. When the mufti recalled the murder in our conversation, he wiped tears from his cheeks: “He was twenty-two years old, a student at the university. What did he do to be killed? At his funeral, I said I forgive you all. I expected them to show remorse. They said we don’t need your forgiveness. We are going to kill you. They say this on television in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Britain. They say the mufti of Syria speaks of Christianity in a positive way. He believes in dialogue, even with Israelis and non-believers. He goes to churches.”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“The outsiders, with their own objectives, provided rifles, ammunition, communications equipment, military vehicles and combat advice to young men who lacked the discipline and patience for a long-term, non-violent and democratic struggle.”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“Michel Samaha, a Lebanese politician with strong public links to the government in Damascus, calls the revolution against President Bashar al-Assad “a Salafist awakening.”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is literally what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone.”
― Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: life and death under Nazi occupation 1940-1944

“Agriculture is twenty percent of GDP. The most important crop is wheat. We are almost self-sufficient, overall almost eighty percent self-sufficient, in food.” In addition, he says, the country’s external debt of $7 billion is only ten percent of GDP, a proportion Greece, Spain, and Italy could envy. With foreign reserves of $17 billion, the country, in his view, could go on importing for another ten months. Syria is receiving assistance from Russia, Iran, and Iraq, which helps further to ease the burden. In any case, as in Iraq from 1990 to 2003, the sanctions are affecting the populace more than the regime. Further harming the people and the economy is the endemic corruption of some within the regime, who have treated the state as their personal business enterprise to be looted at will.”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“the sense of being dehumanised, reduced to little more than an extension of your equipment and weaponry, the constant feeling of being used as an object, manipulated by blind, invisible hands, controlled by a force that was either malignant or stupid, the sense of being exhausted in a metaphorical and quite often literal darkness, of being exhausted, frightened, sick, sometimes so weary that you slept while on your feet like a horse. And ignorance, stupefying, brutalising ignorance.”
― Charles Glass, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

“The Armenians are a people who possess excellent hearts, and whose manners are mild and civil. They are deep politicians, and acquire great riches by commerce.” Nothing had changed in two hundred years, except that the Armenians had endured intolerable suffering and lost a large part of their homeland, and their people, in Turkey.”
― Charles Glass, Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria

“Meleager of Gadara called, in the first century BC, “one country which is the whole world.”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“She assured me that the regime had killed him. When I told her that a childhood friend of his had told me Sariya supported his father and his secularism, she admitted she might have been wrong. It was only what someone had told her.”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“The contrast with many other Sunni Muslim clergymen is stark. Another Syrian mullah, Sheikh Adnan al-Arour, broadcasts regularly from Saudi Arabia with a different message: “The problem is actually with some minorities and sects that support the regime . . . and I mention in particular the Alawite sect. We will never harm any one of them who stood neutral, but those who stood against us, I swear by Allah, we will grind them and feed them to the dogs.” Another Sunni preacher, the Egyptian Sheikh Mohammad al-Zughbey, went further: “Allah! Kill that dirty small sect [the Alawites]. Allah! Destroy them. Allah! They are the Jews’ agents. Kill them all. . . . It is a holy jihad.”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria

“The population of Syria is so inharmonious a gathering of widely different races in blood, in creed, and in custom, that government is both difficult and dangerous.”— Sir Mark Sykes, Dar Ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey”
― Charles Glass, The State of Syria