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

Your policy should be a mixture between your interests and how you reach your ends, but based on values. It cannot be only the end justifies the means, because for the criminals, ends justify the means, for thieves, for every illegal and immoral action, the end justifies the means.

Trust that the thing in life that excites you the most comes complete with all the tools necessary to support you in the doing of that thing. It is automatic; it is built in. All you need to do is act on the opportunities that doing that situation brings to you.

Conversely, it is correct to say that bringing about peace would be the best way to fight terror.

The problem with every American candidate regarding the presidency, I am not talking only about this campaign or elections, but generally, that they say something during the campaign and they do the opposite after the campaign.

Since the beginning of the crisis, since the terrorists started to control some areas within Syria, the majority of the Syrian civilians left that areas to join the government areas, not vice versa. If the majority of the Syrians don’t trust the government, they should go the other way.

We don’t have a lot of expectations [for Donald J. Trump] because the American administration is not only about the President; it’s about different powers within this administration, the different lobbies that they are going to influence any President.

I don’t believe the United States will be ready to join Russia in fighting terrorists in Syria.

Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East.

The Russians are fighting for us, for the world, and for their self.

We can have national dialogue where different Syrian parties sit and discuss the future of Syria. You can have interim government or transitional government. Then you have final elections, parliamentary elections, and you’re going to have presidential elections.

The hope for an American is different from the hope of a Syrian. For me, I should be the hope of the Syrian, not any other one, not American, neither French, nor anyone in the world. I’m President to help the Syrian people.

They need money from abroad, they need moral support and political support from abroad. They don’t have any grassroots, any incubator. So, when you stop the smuggling, we don’t have problems.

I think sadness prevails in Syria now. We don’t feel anything else but sadness because we have this killing every day, whether with chemical or any other kind.

Sometimes you may kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands with very primitive armaments.

We’re talking about one region, bigger regions, not only about Syria. This interlinked region, this intermingled, interlocked, whatever you want to call it ; if you strike somewhere, you have to expect the repercussions somewhere else in different forms in ways you don’t expect.

America is interested in re-arranging the region as it sees fit.

History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

A precedent embalms a principle.

Maybe that’s why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.

Society likes to file you away, put you in this or that category. And I never fit any category.

There’s no precedent for women philosophers and there’s no precedence for most of the things I did.

All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.

It is found by experience that admirable laws and right precedents among the good have their origin in the misdeeds of others.