Words matter. These are the best Beirut Quotes from famous people such as Henry Kissinger, Rabih Alameddine, Greg Kinnear, Paul Greengrass, Jan Morris, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire – this time under the Shia label.
A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.
When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.
I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You’d fly back from somewhere – Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa – on Saturday, and you’d have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.
To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated.
Outside events can change a presidential campaign, a president, and the history of the nation: the Iranian hostage crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the downing of the helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, and, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
I sing ‘Beirut’ for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.
No matter where I go – London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore – I’m always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people’s lives better, not pull them apart.
I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I’d been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.
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.
I knew Quintessentially was a success when my father, who does a lot of business in Beirut, introduced himself to somebody and they said, ‘Oh, do you know Ben Elliot? I’d really like to meet him.’ I remember him ringing me up, really annoyed.
Since 2006, when the Second Lebanon War killed perhaps 2,000 Lebanese, many of them civilians, and led to the destruction of an entire section of Beirut, the northern border has been absolutely quiet.
I come from a specific area in Beirut where it’s multicultural, and it’s a culture that blends with multiple cultures – it’s unbelievable lifestyle.
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, ‘Oh, its temporary.’ It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That’s how they work.
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.
Beirut turned into a war zone in a matter of hours. We were stuck at home, the roads were blocked.
Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.
Growing up in Beirut, I used to go to the souks with my mother to buy fabrics… I understood fashion at an early age, and my first designs were when I was five.
You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city – you don’t need to go to Beirut for that – but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
Our fumbling government’s response since Beirut – during both Republican and Democratic administrations – has been to cut and run, or to flat ignore this growing threat, apparently hoping it would go away.
The secret of any kind of reporting is to go with a guide. So if you, you’re going to see Hezbollah in Beirut, you go with someone who knows the local people, and you’ll be fine.
I was actually lost in Beirut on the way home.
In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn’t fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.
As someone who escaped religious persecution in Lebanon and whose parents were kidnapped in Beirut, I fully support the protection of all individuals from institutional discrimination. That said, I am weary of the ethos of victimhood that has parasitized our culture.
