Robert Fisk - History Quotes

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Journalism is about watching and witnessing history and recording it as honestly as we can... At best, journalists sit at the edge of history as vulcanologists might clamber to the lip of a smoking crater... to peer over... at what happens within.

Robert Fisk
And history s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.

Robert Fisk
I suppose, in the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'

Robert Fisk
I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire.

Robert Fisk
It might be as well for the West to remember that history in the Middle East rarely rewards the just. It never favours the foreigner and it always takes its revenge upon those who see the region through their own eyes. Not once has a foreign military adventure in the Middle East achieved its end.

Robert Fisk