Anthony Shadid Quotations

As a journalist, your job is to bear witness.

Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

In any kind of conflict, you have a certain dehumanization that comes along with it. And it's important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.

Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces.

I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn't.

The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes—when we write small to say something big.

Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War.

I think Syria is often covered by phone. You have to talk to activists. You have to try to read the tea leaves. You have to talk to government officials. It's remote-control reporting in a way.

The Americans invaded a country without understanding what eight years of a war with Iran had meant, how that traumatized Iraq. They didn't appreciate what they support for a decade of sanctions in Iraq had done to Iraq and the bitterness that it created and that it wiped out the middle class.

Time and again, I am struck by how seldom I hear the word, hurriya , 'freedom,' in conversations about politics in the Arab World, ... Much more common among Arabs is the word, adil , 'justice.'

tribal authority had grown in the wake of the government's fall . . . tribal code stipulated a brutal frontier justice, which had come to fill a lawless void. This code, rigorous and unforgiving, was paramount.

The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

Each side, American and Iraqi, saw their actions as responses to the other's threats. Each side felt the other was forcing it to act. Each side thought the other only understood force.

There was an almost divine quality to American power; it was merciless in its practice, flawless in its execution, ... Saddam had ruled for thirty-five years; the Americans had toppled him in less than three weeks, and relatively few of their soldiers had died in the task. How could these same Americans be so feeble in the aftermath?

I don't think there's any story worth dying for, but I do think there are stories worth taking risks for.