In Their Words

Comments from and about the Olympics:

“We have these every day,” said Ahmad Hijazi, a native of Lebanon, who now lives in Miami and works for a tour service. “We have bombs going off in Lebanon,” he said Saturday in Atlanta.

When what he would tell his American clients when they emerged from their hotels, Hijazi said:

“Nobody goes before his time. You cannot stop and hide.”

“We felt, like, this wind in our hair and our ears. We’re still kind of ringing,” said visitor T.J. Escott of Richmond, Va.

“I think terrorism has come to America,” said Martin Medhurst, a scholar at Texas A&M University. “It has been going on in Europe for two decades or more. This is not the end. This is just the beginning.”

“Terrorism scares and kills and causes a lot of individual pain, but long term, it can’t change a society. In the end, the only change it can effect is the change we do to ourselves to protect ourselves,” said Terry Anderson, who spent seven years as a hostage in Beirut, Lebanon.