Cairo Quotes

• Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready. Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

  Dashiell Hammett

  Want, Smooth, Spades

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• Egyptians undergo an odd personality change behind the wheel of a car. In every other setting, aggression and impatience are frowned upon. The unofficial Egyptian anthem "Bokra, Insha'allah, Malesh" (Tomorrow, God Willing, Never Mind) isn't just an excuse for laziness. In a society requiring millennial patience, it is also a social code dictating that no one make too much of a fuss about things. But put an Egyptian in the driver's seat and he shows all the calm and consideration of a hooded swordsman delivering Islamic justice.

  Tony Horwitz

  Islamic, Justice, Car

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• I miss aspects of being in the Arab world - the language - and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it's Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, 'This river has flown here for thousands of years.' There are magical moments in these places.

  Zaha Hadid

  Thinking, Years, Cities

  Interview With Hannah Pool, www.theguardian.com. March 4, 2009.

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• Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Beautiful, Song, Morning

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• At the beginning, I thought the best Islamic work was in Spain - the mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada. But as I learned more, my ideas shifted. I traveled to Egypt, and to the Middle East many times.I found the most wonderful examples of Islamic work in Cairo, it turns out. I'd visited mosques there before, but I didn't see them with the same eye as I did this time. They truly said something to me about Islamic architecture.

  I. M. Pei

  Islamic, Eye, Egypt

  Source: archtalks.com

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• My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Mother, Iron, Sound

  Augusten Burroughs (2010). “Running with Scissors: A Memoir”, p.6, Macmillan

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• Ah, the camel of Cairo! ... He went quietly and comfortably through the narrowest lanes and the densest crowds by the mere force of his personality. He was the most impressive living thing we saw in Egypt, not excepting two Pashas and a Bey. He was engaged with large philosophies, one could see that.

  Sara Jeannette Duncan

  Philosophy, Two, Egypt

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• Those small brown men who sell their sisters on the streets of Cairo were once the mighty Egyptians.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Men, Brown, Streets

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• When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don't have clean water, when you don't have a sewer system, when you don't have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now... Well, put all that together, and it's a ticking bomb. It's not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Water, Together, Bombs

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• The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.

  Barack Obama

  War, America, Mind Blowing

  Announces the Death of Osama Bin Laden, delivered 1 May 2011

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• I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

  Barack Obama

  Responsibility, Fighting, Mind Blowing

  A New Beginning: Speech at Cairo University, delivered 4 June 2009, Cairo, Egypt

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• More so than any other city on the African continent, the people of Cairo look like the American Negroes in the sense that we have all complexions, we range in America from the darkest black to the lightest light, and here in Cairo it is the same thing; throughout Egypt, it is the same thing. All of the complexions are blended together here in a truly harmonious society.

  Malcolm X

  Light, Egypt, Cities

  Source: www.panafricanperspective.com

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• The Nile, draining out into the Mediterranean. The bright lights of Cairo announce the opening of the north-flowing river’s delta, with Jerusalem’s answering high beams to the northeast. This 4,258 mile braid of human life, first navigated end-to-end in 2004, is visible in a single glance from space.

  Chris Hadfield

  Light, Rivers, Space

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• There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Writing, Media, Cities

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I lived in South Africa, someone told me what the longest road in Africa is. It's not the road from Cairo to Capetown, it's the way from your head to your heart, and from there to the here and now.

  Bert Hellinger

  Heart, Way, Here And Now

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• The lesson I learned in Cairo still applies. The only way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.

  Boutros Boutros-Ghali

  Lessons, Way, Violence

  "he Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance". Book by Laurie Garrett, 1995.

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• Both of these places, Cairo's downtown and Tahrir Square, are in the heart of downtown Cairo. They are places where young people gather to exchange political and cultural ideas. And so that's possibly a factor into why they went after these institutions, although there's been no public comment from the government on why these raids happened.

  Leila Fadel

  Heart, Ideas, Squares

  Source: www.npr.org

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• A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?

  Charles Stross

  Religious, College, Issues

  Charles Stross (2005). “Accelerando”, p.156, Penguin

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• In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.

  Charles C. Mann

  Powerful, Russia, Aztec

  Charles C. Mann (2006). “1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”, p.74, Vintage

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• When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

  Ray Bradbury

  Book, Fire, Sky

  Ray Bradbury (1962). “Something wicked this way comes: a novel”, Bantam

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• My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place [cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison] taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never, therefore, make any progress.

  Anwar Sadat

  Cells, Progress, Fabric

  Anwar Sadat (1978). “In Search of Identity: An Autobiography”, New York : Harper & Row

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• From the streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from the busy political calendar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, social media was not only sharing the news but driving it.

  Dan Rather

  Wall, Spring, Japan

  "I’ve Discovered Facebook" by Dan Rather, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 16, 2011.

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• There are these very poor communities on the outskirts of Cairo called Mokattam, where a lot of the garbage collectors live. I used to volunteer there, doing health and education work when I was younger and living in Egypt.

  Jehane Noujaim

  Egypt, Volunteer, Community

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• Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.

  Bill Ayers

  Spring, Real, Rights

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• The embassy in Cairo put out a statement after their grounds had been breached. ... An apology for America's values is never the right course. ... The statement that came from the administration was - was a statement which is akin to apology and I think was a - a severe miscalculation.

  Mitt Romney

  Stupid, Apology, Thinking

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