"One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror. "
— George W. Bush

"Thomas Jefferson once said: 'Of course the people don't want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.' I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot."
— Jon Stewart

"Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated"
— Saddam Hussein (The Revolution and Woman in Iraq)

"The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking"
— Marvin Bell (Mars Being Red)

"When the president during the campaign
said he was against nation building,
I didn't realize he meant our nation."
— Al Franken

"In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones."
— George Clooney

"Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That‘s why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if— as the war ends, or at least starts to end— if, at this time, the history of the war is written as us going there to topple the regime of a bad man when that frankly isn‘t why were told that we were going there— Aren‘t we still at risk of making this horrific mistake again? And, aren‘t we letting the people who foisted the WMD idea on us, not many years ago, aren‘t we sort of letting them get away with it?"
— Rachel Maddow

"In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget.... For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor.
p. 264"
— Rory Stewart (The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq)

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor"
— Benjamin Netanyahu

"Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps--located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq."
— Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss)

"The west need someone to tell the man who walks around with the biggest stick in the world, that that stick can`t bring down God`s house."
— Saddam Hussein

""I have to be accurate; I don't have to be impartial""
— John Burns, New York Times

"JFK's great virtue, and the essential difference between him and George W. Bush, was that he had an instinctive appreciation for the chaotic forces of history."
— Michael Dobbs (One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War)

"Whoever tries to climb over our fence, we will try to climb over his house. "
— Saddam Hussein (Saddam Hussein on Current Events in Iraq)