“You can forge anything these days, and we’re living in a fake news era.”

The United States accused Syria, and because you accused you have to bring evidence [of chemical weapons], this first of all. We have to find evidences when we are there.

We don’t discuss this issue [conversations with Russia] as a government, but we discuss the repercussions, which is more important because sometimes repercussions could be more destroying than the strike itself.

This war [in Syria] is going to support Al-Qaeda and the same people that killed Americans in the 11th of September.

But for us, in Syria, we have principles. We’ll do anything to prevent the region from another crazy war. It’s not only Syria. Because it will start in Syria.

It’s very simple ; once the Western countries stop supporting those terrorists and making pressure on their puppet countries and client states like Saudi Arabia and Turkey and others, you’ll have no problem in Syria. It will be solved easily.

At the end, killing is killing. Massacring is massacring.

In any war, people will pay the price.

It’s not about me, again, this fight is not my fight, it’s not the fight of the government ; it’s the fight of the country, of the Syrian people.

We have hopes that we can see rational American presidents; fair, obey the international law, deal with other countries according to mutual respect, parity, etc., but we all know that this is only wishful thinking and fantasy.

We have the precedent of Collin Powell ten years ago, when he showed the evidence, it was false, and it was forged.

Simply naming objectives isn’t sufficient for a vision. If I say that I’m going to build a large palace, but I don’t have any money to do so, then that is not a vision – it’s an illusion.

Let’s talk… we have indications, let me just finish this point, because how can use WMD while your troops are only 100 meters away from it ? Is it logical ? It doesn’t happen. It cannot be used like this.

You cannot have democracy without the institutions. You cannot have a democracy that is built on the moods of self-interested people.

We are dealing with treachery and threats, which accompanied the establishment of Israel.

Because of this interference for the last fifty years, that’s why they are very good only in creating problems, not in solving problems. That’s the problem with the American role.

Those fighters, the Syrian part that you’re talking about, lost its natural incubators in the Syrian society – they don’t have incubators anymore ; that’s why they have incubators abroad.

In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.

When I grew up in the ’60s, your hair had to be straight and you had to be skinny and have no boobs, and it was like not my era.

Tayyip Erdoğan is megalomaniac President, he is not stable. He lives during the Ottoman era, he doesn’t live in the current time. He’s out of touch with the reality.

It was a great time to grow up in Chicago. It was the mid-80s, and we had the 85 Bears and the Michael Jordan era.

What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

In this era in which we live, the old-fashioned virtues grow increasingly unpopular.

I never put myself in a box. I like to have various different types of songs and different genres and situational songs.