“Iraqis will decide who controls Iraq - no one from outside.”

“But for the media to name their coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq the same as what the Pentagon calls it—everyday seeing 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'—you have to ask: 'If this were state controlled media, how would it be any different?”

“Since 1968, the Baath have been trashing the only idea that can hold the great social diversity of Iraq together: the idea of Iraq. Their answer to the question "Who am I?" was: You are either one of us, or you are dead. True to their word, they killed anyone who dared to say he was a Kurd or a Shiite or a leftist, or a democrat and a liberal. Contrary to what many Iraqi Shiites tend to think nowadays, the Baath never wanted to build a Sunni confessional state in Iraq. Anti-Shiite sectarianism was introduced on a large scale after the uprising of 1991. The state that the Baath built in Iraq up until the 1991 Gulf War was worse than sectarian. It thrived on the distrust, suspicion and fear that it went about inculcating in everyone. In this sense it was consistently egalitarian. Atomizing society by breeding hate and a thirst for revenge was the regime's highest ambition and principal tool of social control. Every Iraqi -- Kurd or Arab, Muslim or Christian, Shiite or Sunni -- became both complicit in the Baathist enterprise and its victim at the same time.”

“We are the ones who create the messes in our heads. It does not come from outside.”

“To play God today is to be the owner of human life, to control that life in all of his stages and all of its forms. A control that decides who must be eliminated and when.”

“The fear that rules us comes NOT from the outside but from within. Mastering self-control also means stripping the rulers of a prized weapon.”

“The US lost control of security on day one, with the outbreak of looting. Iraqis are a people that had known nothing but a surplus of security. To suddenly take all that away and say, in effect, you are on your own, was unforgivable. They felt that no one was in control. And when your whole world is being turned upside down, the feeling that no one is in control is terrifying, and consequently it is conducive of the most irrational forms of behavior.”

“The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.”

“This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself.”

“You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.”