Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Michael Totten
Michael Totten Quotes
108 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Iran has been funding terrorism for decades. Iran hasn't stopped funding terrorism for even five seconds since the day it started. We can safely assume that since Iran funded terrorism yesterday, and that since the sun came up this morning, Iran is still funding terrorism today. And unless the government is overthrown before midnight tonight, it's safe to assume that Iran will continue funding terrorism tomorrow. Iran's rulers haven't even pretended to stop, so let's just cut through the B. S.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
A few years ago, the government stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because most Cubans can't afford to go to these places, anyway.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Lebanon and Iraq are the two most sectarian countries in the Arab world.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Colombia's scenery is spectacular, its literary and arts scene world class, its biodiversity unmatched by any nation on earth. While it still has a moderately high crime rate in some areas, the homicide rate is now as low as Portland, Oregon's. It's almost as if whatever dark force consumed Colombia for so many decades picked up and moved to the country next door.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
There are five times as many Muslims in the United States as there are in Belgium, but the United States is not a hotbed of homegrown Islamic extremism. We've suffered some acts of terrorism since 9/11—the mass shooting in San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon bombing and the massacre at Fort Hood. If American Muslims and European Muslims were equally predisposed to jihadism, we'd experience roughly five times as many attacks. But we don't, mostly because Muslims feel more at home in the United States than they do in Europe.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
At least the Russian Socialist Realists were talented artists. They produced totalitarian propaganda, yes, but they did it competently. Their paintings are interesting and engaging, and not just because they're curious historical artifacts.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
A democratic Iran would be a natural ally of the United States while the Saudis, with their popularly backed medieval system, are natural enemies. At some point the U.S. will pivot, and the pivot will likely be permanent, but until the clerical regime in Tehran reforms itself out of all recognition or is overthrown from below, we're stuck with the awkward and ailing alliance we have. Let's try not to squander it further.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Even hotels are asking guests to bring their own, which is almost impossible unless they're coming in from abroad. Violent crime has spread throughout the country, even to rural areas. Police officers don't even attempt to suppress or solve crime, partly because they're too busy protecting the crooked and oppressive government from its furious subjects, but also because crime is as ubiquitous in Venezuela right now as the heat and humidity.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
The overwhelming majority of Sanders supporters have no memory of Soviet totalitarianism or the Berlin Wall; they know nothing of a world in which the United States was not the world's only superpower, a world where, if America had slipped, human rights and democratic government might have been eclipsed almost everywhere. The Sanders delegates, when they get older, likely won't take pride, as Biden does, in America's military strength. Their lives, and their generational experience of history, are drastically different. And the Democratic Party—and the Republican Party, too—will have to reckon with this.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Their absolute monarchy isn't drastically different from the ISIS 'caliphate' in Syria and Iraq except that Riyadh plays well with others diplomatically and pushes back hard against Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudis do so for entirely self-interested reasons, of course. They don't care about human rights any more than the Iranians do. They're the world biggest proponents of hard-line Sunni fanaticism. The only reason they're bothered by ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood is because ISIS and the Brotherhood threaten the Saudi royal family's stranglehold on absolute power.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Saudi Arabia is the most backward and medieval society in the entire world outside ISIS and Taliban-occupied territory. Tehran is like Amsterdam compared with Riyadh despite the Iranian government's theocratic regulations and draconian enforcers.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Ban guns in stores and at gun shows all you want—it will affect law-abiding citizens, not terrorists. Anything and everything banned by governments just moves to the black market, from guns and drugs to prostitution. According to the National Observatory for Delinquency, the number of illegal weapons in France has been increasing by double-digit percentages for years. Criminals and terrorists don't need to pass background checks, nor do they need Wal-mart. They buy their guns on the street.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Extra work for no pay in Cuba? Cubans are hardly paid anyway. Most of them work for the state and earn a maximum wage of twenty dollars a month. Cuba's maximum wage is less than one percent of America's minimum wage. So they're already working for free. What difference does a couple more hours make?
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
A black man named Tim Scott was just elected senator in a state-wide race in South Carolina, and he's a Republican.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
It's astonishing. It's probably the most pro-American place in the world. Certainly the most pro-American place I've ever been.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
And at least the U.S. got something out of the deal. At least our people are still among the living when they come home... Iran committed three criminal acts against American citizens and paid no price. We put kidnappers in prison for a very long time in this country, but the Iranian government was rewarded. What's to stop that government from doing it again? Nothing. Why should the Iranian government stop? Kidnapping and ransoming hostages works. And the regime is already gearing up to do it again.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Of course sanctions have a negative effect on the economy, but the main cause of Cuban poverty is communist economics. Every communist country in the history of the world has been impoverished. It's a bankrupt system that has never worked and never can work. Here's just one reason why. The United States has a minimum wage while Cuba has a maximum wage. And that maximum wage is a paltry 20 dollars a month. No one can get ahead. It's impossible. It's illegal. When prosperity is a crime, there can be no prosperity, and that's entirely the fault of Cuba's communist party.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
No more do I want to hear that Europeans are more sophisticated than Americans.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
I visited Iraq seven times during the war... Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It's the wrong comparison. So are impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn't a developing country; it's a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana's history mirrors theirs, after all.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Donald Trump, along with Bernie Sanders and Gary Johnson and so many others, talks about Iraq as if the Middle East would be fine if the Baath Party were left in place in Baghdad. It's a frankly ludicrous proposition. The Baath Party is still in place next-door in Syria, and how's that working out? These kinds of governments can only keep a lid on things until they can't.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Northern Ireland is not homogeneous, and it is not pacifist. Belfast is the most car-bombed city in the history of Europe. There is no 'Northern Irish' identity that binds everybody together. The Catholic half of the population identifies with the Republic of Ireland while the Protestant half identifies with the United Kingdom.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
In 2005, Beirut looked and felt like a Middle Eastern version of Berlin in 1989... It turned out, Beirut was really more like Budapest in 1956.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Almost everybody hates the Washington swamp, including lots of people who live there. Of all American institutions, Congress has the lowest approval rating, less than 10 percent, and the military has the highest at 73 percent. In the Middle East and Latin America, numbers like these would portend a military coup. But we don't live in the Middle East or Latin America. We live here. So instead of a military coup, we got Donald Trump.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Iraq has never been a coherent nation-state; arguably, it wouldn't exist if the British Empire hadn't installed the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932. Its three biggest communities—Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs and Kurds¬—have proven themselves incapable of living together in peace. The country will probably never be both democratic and stable within its current borders. Splitting Iraq into its three constituent parts would be better for the people who live there. It would be better for us, too, insofar as this separation would prevent the kind of unstable anarchy that breeds both Sunni and Shia militias, including ISIS.
Michael Totten
Source
Report...
Beijing wants to impose its rule on Taiwan like it has in Hong Kong, Tibet and East Turkestan. If any half-way moral and sensible person had their way, the reverse would happen and Taiwan would export its democratic Chinese model to its 900-pound cousin. That's probably what will eventually happen anyway, even if China militarily conquers Taiwan in the meantime.
Michael Totten
1
2
3
4
5
Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Michael Totten
Creative Commons
Bio:
Michael J. Totten is an American journalist and author who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans, Cuba, Vietnam, and the Caucasus. His work appears in various publications, Web sites, and on his blog.
Known for:
Resurrection: A Zombie Novel
In the Wake of the Surge
Taken
Road to Fatima Gate
Most used words:
american
government
united
russia
states
country
isis
muslims
iran
people
europe
war
iraq
communist
iranian
Michael Totten on Wikipedia
Michael Totten on Twitter
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Michael Totten Quotes
Michael Totten Short Quotes
American Journalist Quotes
Journalist Quotes
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes