politician, film director, actor, singer, musician, composer, screenwriter
1922 – 2012
We don't want any Vietnamese in Cambodia.... We will be very glad if you solve our problem. We are not opposed to hot pursuit in uninhabited areas. You would be liberating us from the Viet Cong. For me only Cambodia counts. I want you to force the Viet Cong to leave Cambodia. In unpopulated areas, where there are not Cambodians,- such precise cases I would shut my eyes.
Cambodia only protests against the destruction of the property and lives of Cambodians. All I can say is that I cannot make a protest as long as I am not informed. But I will protest if there is any destruction of Khmer life and property.Here it is - the first report about several B-52 bombings. Yet I have not been informed about that at all, because I have not lost any houses, any countrymen, nothing, nothing. Nobody was caught in those barrages - nobody, Cambodians.
I don't want to become a kind of Hirohito who produces cameras, or an Elizabeth of England who cares only for horses. Even less do I want to turn out like Juan Carlos, who's just a ghost of Franco. I have no personal ambitions.
Do you really believe that a man like me, who suffers for a country where B52s make 260 incursions a day, could miss the good life and jazz orchestras? I don't miss anything. I'm in mourning, and I don't even think of the carefree days of back then. What's done is done. If I had my Lancias, my Alfa Romeos and my Mercedes, I wouldn't know what to do with them now.
Ah, China is a formidable country. An Asian can't help but love China and take pride in it. China doesn't export tanks and men. It exports dignity and respect.
He's the truest friend I've ever had. What's more, he's an exquisite man, full of kindness and sophistication, the most aristocratic aristocrat one can meet. To those who can't understand how I, a non-communist, could be friends with Zhou Enlai, I say: "But he's a prince more princely than I am!"
… I hate them. Them and their false democracy, their false liberty, their imperialism conducted in the name of christian civilisation, their coups, like the coup which they started against me...
Everyone knows now that it was Nixon who wanted me liquidated. For a long time, the Americans dreamed of doing to me what they failed to do against Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs incident.
Oh, I'm not entirely without blame! It was a mistake to have chosen Lon Nol as my right-hand man, my chief of staff, my prime minister, without ever suspecting that he was a traitor in league with the CIA. I thought he was a patriot... Who would have thought the Americans would use him? After all, he was a complete idiot! He never understood a damn thing, always staring at me with those bovine eyes of his, and spending all his time praying.
History is full of traitors, and what's happened to me with Lon Nol is no exception. However, traitors are usually intelligent, not cretins like Lon Nol! I'm ashamed of my race for having begotten an idiot like Lon Nol. But the biggest idiot here isn't Lon Nol. It was Sihanouk who chose Lon Nol.
[I'm as naïve] as a child sometimes. People think I'm like Machiavelli. And yet I'm an even bigger sucker than Machiavelli was... In diplomatic manoevering, I seem devious and diabolical in my intentions, when in reality I'm not even that clever.
For God's sake! If I ran a dictatorship, then what is Lon Nol running? I renounced my throne to show the masses that there's no such thing as divine right, that no one descends from the heavens to rule the people.
It's not Mao Tse-tung who threatens southeast Asia, nor is it Ho Chi Minh. If all of Indochina becomes communist, we can thank America, its mistakes, blunders, crimes and imperialism which protects or launches invariably corrupt, dictatorial and unpopular regimes simply because they are anti-communist.
I'm not a communist, but I'm not anti-communist either. I'm not afraid of communists, and declare that if a country wants to be communist, it has the right to be so.
The Chinese, in their infinite wisdom, have taught me that one must know when to choose between the primary and secondary enemy. For China, the primary enemy is the Soviet Union, and the secondary one is America. Therefore, they deal with the Soviet Union first, and America later. For me, the primary enemy is American imperialism and Lon Nol's fascism. My secondary enemies are the communists. Thus, I choose to ally myself with the secondary enemy to defeat the primary.
I want my country to be independent, always independent. I have to defend my convictions as a patriot and as a national leader. I have done my best, but as a human being I cannot be perfect, nobody is perfect.
Time will inevitably uncover dishonesty and lies; history has no place for them.