It is not possible to play terrorism as a card and then put it in your pocket.
– Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, 4 Oct 2013
These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
– Tacitus