Power, Faith, and Fantasy Quotes

“Before terminating at the Berlin Wall, the front in the Cold War ran through the hellish jungles of Vietnam to the oases and deceptively idyllic dunes of the Middle East.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“An example of this activism was rendered by one of America’s newest and most controversial sects, the Mormons. Joseph Smith, the movement’s founder, was a committed restorationist, and in October 1841 he sent his personal Apostle, Orson Hyde, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Climbing the Mount of Olives, Hyde erected an altar and beseeched God to “restore the kingdom unto Israel—raise up Jerusalem as its capital, and continue her people [as] a distinct nation and government.” Mormons would later integrate that prayer into their liturgy and, on the site of Hyde’s altar, build a branch of Brigham Young University.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“And while generally loyal to the United States, ibn Saud displayed no reservations about negotiating with Britain and France in order to extract higher contract fees from the Americans. Indeed, when asked by American negotiators why he favored the United States over the Europeans, ibn Saud candidly replied, “You are very far away!”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“detested the missionaries who made people “permanently miserable by telling them…how blissful a place heaven is, and [how] nearly impossible it is to get there.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“Those who tried to escape received the customary punishment, as Nicholson harrowingly described: After they had stripped the sufferer naked, they inserted the iron pointed stake into the lower termination of the vertebrae, and thence forced it up near his back bone, until it appeared between the shoulders, avoiding the vital parts. The stake was then raised in the air and the poor sufferer exposed to the view of the other slaves, writhing in…insupportable agony.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“such banditti who might for half the sum that is paid them be exterminated from the Earth.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“an angel sent on this business…could have done nothing”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“unfeeling tyrants” who cared no more for their subjects’ lives “than…so many caterpillars upon an apple tree.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“an “ominous” figure suggestive of “pestilence and war.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present