Top 70 Omar El Akkad Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “It is said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past – the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting.”

— Omar El Akkad

2. “And what do you think the prerequisite for kindness is? Have you ever tried to be kind to someone better off than you?”

— Omar El Akkad

3. “You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”

— Omar El Akkad

4. “The refugees peer from their small, tattered tents to watch because this is what they have become: watchers, honed by captivity into seasoned observers of incremental change.”

— Omar El Akkad

5. “It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester-perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence-a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

— Omar El Akkad

6. “This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them.”

— Omar El Akkad

7. “Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”

— Omar El Akkad

8. “They think there is only so much living to go around.”

— Omar El Akkad

9. “I know how much you have fought and how much you have suffered. You want something the size of your vengeance, Sarat? This, I believe, is the size of your vengeance.”

— Omar El Akkad

10. “What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

— Omar El Akkad

11. “Vanna could not help but think of ancestry as a king of shackle one could never fully unclasp, an umbilical cord that, not matter how deeply cut, could never be severed.”

— Omar El Akkad

12. “Today you are the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though you never existed.”

— Omar El Akkad

13. “Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.”

— Omar El Akkad

14. “There was a freedom in it, a temporary dispersal of the mundane.”

— Omar El Akkad

15. “Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them.”

— Omar El Akkad

16. “Every man you ever meet in nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed.”

— Omar El Akkad

17. “That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.”

— Omar El Akkad

18. “Everyone fights an American war.”

— Omar El Akkad

19. “She wanted her to feel love the way a bone feels a break, to make her scream in a language she never even knew she knew, a language deposited from her lips like secrets into the vault of a muffling pillow. She wanted it to hurt, and for Layla to want it to hurt.”

— Omar El Akkad

20. “She seemed so often a compendium of all her past selves, none of whom Vanna could ever interrogate, young women at various forks, turning this way or that. There were swarms of her, and Vanna did not know a single one.”

— Omar El Akkad

21. “Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence in a city already overburdened. At the foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be a pestilence field. We carried signs calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would take them in. It made me feel good to do it, it made me feel rooted; their unbelonging was proof of my belonging.”

— Omar El Akkad

22. “They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”

— Omar El Akkad

23. “All her life she’d had little interest in the workings of boys’ minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.”

— Omar El Akkad

24. “But the two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad – they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.”

— Omar El Akkad

25. “In this country he felt a great distance from almost all the children he’d met, such that he could think of friendship only as a thing that depended on him being useful.”

— Omar El Akkad

26. “But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester – perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence – a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

— Omar El Akkad

27. “My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself.”

— Omar El Akkad

28. “You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they were still fighting all of them at once.”

— Omar El Akkad

29. “You have to grow up, Sarat. You’re not a little girl anymore. Look, just try not to give anybody reason to make fun of you, is all. You’ll make more friends that way.”

— Omar El Akkad

30. “She held the woman’s hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they’d first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.”

— Omar El Akkad

31. “She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.”

— Omar El Akkad

32. “I’m sorry, Sarat.” “Why’d you do it?” she asked me. “I just wanted to know.” “Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”

— Omar El Akkad

33. “Her anger at the young woman’s stubbornness quickly prompted recollections of all the times she’d found herself on one side or another of these meaningless, bigoted demarcations; all the times she’d been made to feel alien to some stranger’s expectation of what constituted the right and normal world – the color of her skin, the ethnicity of the man she’d chosen to marry, even her tomboy daughter.”

— Omar El Akkad

34. “More people will starve to death because of this decision, taken in the halls of power far away from where the starvation will happen, taken by people who will never be held responsible for any of it, who will live out the rest of their lives in total comfort. And should some activist interrupt their night out at a restaurant to show them pictures of the children they’ve helped kill, they will be deeply offended. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely.”

— Omar El Akkad

35. “The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.”

— Omar El Akkad

36. “It’s a frequent, nauseating political inheritance: come to experience the world under the reign of someone who thinks of you as subhuman, as undeserving of a future, and an ugly impression is settled that true power is the ability to do the same to someone else.”

— Omar El Akkad

37. “There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher.”

— Omar El Akkad

38. “Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.”

— Omar El Akkad

39. “And on the heels of that realization, a converse one: I begin to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don’t. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others.”

— Omar El Akkad

40. “It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.”

— Omar El Akkad

41. “This work of leaving, of aiming to challenge power on the field where it maintains the least glaring asymmetry, demands one answer the question: What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering? It makes it impossible for one so engaged to not understand, with terrible clarity, that under the auspices of this machine, the prevailing answer echoing from the mouths of so many of one’s own neighbors is: Nothing at all.”

— Omar El Akkad

42. “Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.”

— Omar El Akkad

43. “The structures of international law, undermined at every turn, will nonetheless attempt to operate as if law were an evenly allotted thing. As though criminality remains criminal even when the powerful support, bankroll, or commit the crime.”

— Omar El Akkad

44. “I understand this is just how things are, ethical double-jointedness being a necessary requirement for the daily debasements of modern political life. And yet I still wonder how someone can maintain this particular facade and sleep at night.”

— Omar El Akkad

45. “Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.”

— Omar El Akkad

46. “It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.”

— Omar El Akkad

47. “The world, full of people who factor not one iota in the calculus of those morning meetings, looks upon this and asks, simply: Beyond self-interest, what do you believe in? And every morning the answer, dressed up in anesthetic euphemism and dependent on our collective capacity for resignation to the lesser of two evils, is: Nothing.”

— Omar El Akkad

48. “Entire departments of postcolonial studies will churn out papers interrogating the obliviousness that led us all to that very dark place, as though no one had seen from the beginning exactly what that place was, as though no one had screamed warnings at the top of their lungs back when there was time to do something.”

— Omar El Akkad

49. “One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.”

— Omar El Akkad

50. “This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”

— Omar El Akkad