"Sadat! Sadat!" tens of thousands of Cairenes chanted at the grinning figure in the open limousine. ''Sadat! The man of peace!'' It was the night of Nov. 21, 1977. President Anwar el-Sadat had just returned from his epochal journey to Jerusalem. Egypt's people were giving their frenzied approval to what his trip had achieved - an Egyptian-Israeli thaw that set the stage for the peace treaty of 1979. What made Mr. Sadat into such a catalytic force in Middle Eastern history was a display of courage and flexibility that transformed what had seemed to be an average Arab officer-turned-potentate. Unlike so many of his brother Arab leaders, he was willing to ignore past Arab-Israeli hatreds. Unlike them all, he was daring enough to do what had been unthinkable in the anguished world of Arab politics - to extend the hand of peace to the Israeli foe. Reversing Egypt's longstanding policy, he proclaimed his willingness to accept Israel's existence as a sovereign state. Admiration and Hatred Then, where so many Middle East negotiators had failed, he succeeded, along with Presidents Carter and Reagan and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, in keeping the improbable rapprochement alive. In the process he earned himself, in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, the admiration of Americans, Israelis and other supporters of a Middle East settlement. But he also drew outpourings of hatred from Palestinians and other Arabs who felt he was a traitor to their struggles against Israel. And he was unable to quash dissidence in his impoverished, seething homeland. He often said he wanted to bequeath democratic institutions to his people, but in recent weeks he staged a dictatorial crackdown on militant Moslems and Coptic Christians as well as secular political opponents. And he claimed imperially - but hollowly, as it turned out - to have put an end to ''lack of discipline in any way or form.'' The Treaty Eleven days before Mr. Sadat made his trip to Jerusalem, he said in Cairo that he was willing to go to ''the ends of the earth,'' and even to the Israeli Parliament, in the cause of peace. The Israeli Government made known that he was welcome in Jerusalem, and after complex negotiations he flew there, although a state of war still existed between the two nations. His eyes were moist and his lips taut with suppressed emotion as he arrived, but his Arabic was firm and resonant when, hours later, he told the hushed Israeli Parliament, ''If you want to live with us in this part of the world, in sincerity I tell you that we welcome you among us with all security and safety.'' Praising Mr. Sadat's initiative, Prime Minister Begin said, ''We, the Jews, know how to appreciate such courage.'' Mr. Sadat's flexibility, he said later, stemmed from his solitary confinement as a political prisoner in cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison in 1947 and 1948. ''My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality and will never, therefore, make any progress,'' he wrote in his memoirs, ''In Search of Identity,'' which appeared in 1978, eight years after he assumed the Presidency. Pact Signed at White House His willingness to make such a change led to the treaty that, after many snags, he and Prime Minister Begin signed at the White House on March 26, 1979. Before reaching agreement Mr. Sadat and Mr. Begin had drawn-out and sometimes acrimonious negotiations, for which they were the joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. The treaty provided that Israel return to Egypt in phases the entire Sinai Peninsula, which the Israelis seized in the 1967 war. It also envisioned internal autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank of the Jordan River under continued Israeli control. The Egyptian and Israeli Governments were helped and prodded by the Nixon and Carter Administrations, and Henry A. Kissinger, after many meetings with Mr. Sadat, wrote that the Egyptian leader ''possessed that combinat ion of insight and courage which marks a great statesman.'' The former Secretary of State continued in his book, ''White House Years'': ''He had the boldness to go to a war no one thought he could sustain; the moderation to move to peace immediately afterward; and the wisdom to reverse attitudes hardened by decades.'' Used Harmony as a Technique In dealings with Israel and the United States, Mr. Sadat strove to create a harmonious mood that would make it difficult for others to disagree with him. His most audacious use of that technique was the Jerusalem visit. That gesture and the treaty with Israel brought him hatred and vituperation from many Arab leaders. There was particular outrage because the treaty did not provide a timetable for full self-determination for the West Bank Palestinians that would lead eventually to an independent Palestinian state. Self-determination was originally Mr. Sadat's minimum demand; when he settled for less, he found himself virtually isolated in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia's leaders, with whom he had achieved warm relations, cut back their aid to the Egyptian armed forces and the economy, which Mr. Sadat had tried to strengthen by encouraging business. The Saudi action made Egypt more dependent than ever on support from the United States, with which Mr. Sadat had also been careful to cultivate bonds of friendship. Under his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cairo's relations with the Americans, as with the Saudis, were hostile much of the time. Mr. Sadat won moral and political support from Washington as well as large-scale economic and military aid, and in 1975 he became the first Egyptian President to make a state visit to the United States. He returned again during the treaty negotiations, and President Carter went to Egypt, where throngs hailed him and his host. Treaty Welcomed by Egyptians Many of the 40 million Egyptians, having gone through four painful and expensive wars with Israel, were enthusiastic about the peace treaty. Throngs of well-wishers danced, waved signs and threw rose petals in celebration. Under the treaty Israel's withdrawal of its civilian and military forces from Sinai was to be carried out in stages over three years. Two-thirds of the area was to be handed back within nine months after the exchange of formal ratification documents. In return for the Israeli pullback, Mr. Sadat agreed to establish peace. After the nine-month withdrawal was finished, the two Governments were to take up ''normal and friendly relations'' in the diplomatic, economic and cultural spheres, among others. The early withdrawals were completed, and the final phase is scheduled for next April. ''This is certainly one of the happiest moments of my life,'' Mr. Sadat, deeply moved, said at the signing ceremony. ''In all the steps I took I was merely expressing the will of a nation. I am proud of my people and of belonging to them.'' Expels Soviet Advisers Another of Mr. Sadat's major shifts in policy was his departure from Nasser's longstanding pro-Soviet stance. In July 1972 he abruptly ordered the withdrawal of the 25,000 Soviet military specialists and advisers in Egypt. By so doing, he later wrote, ''I wanted to tell the whole world that we are always our own masters.'' The changes in the relationship with Washington and Moscow were made after Mr. Sadat had concluded that the Arabs could not achieve a satisfactory end to their confrontation with Israel as long as they were allied closely with the Soviet Union while Israel had the all out support of the United States. He was able to make such sharp policy shifts in part because for much of his later tenure as President, his power did not seem to be seriously challenged at home. A career officer and longtime confidant of Nasser, he was named Vice President in 1969, came out ahead in a brief power struggle after Nasser's death in 1970 and was formally made President by a rubber-stamp vote of members of the Arab Socialist Union, the only legal political organization. He consolidated and enlarged his power in the spring of 1971 when, with the aid of the army, he forestalled what he said was a coup and arrested his opponents. Called Himself a Peasant Mr. Sadat was widely though not universally popular with the Egyptian people, with whom, in his highly emotional way, he felt a warm and almost mystic bond. In ''In Search of Identity,'' he proudly called himself ''a peasant born and brought up on the banks of the Nile.'' Early in his presidency, Mr. Sadat enhanced his popularity by eliminating many of the police-state controls that Nasser had relied on to keep himself in power in the years after the officers' revolt that brought down the monarchy in 1952. In 1973 Mr. Sadat did much to build national self-respect when he ordered Egyptian troops to cross the Suez Canal; they managed to overrun the heavily fortified Israeli positions on the east bank within a few hours. That confidence lingered although the Israelis counterattacked, putting a large tank force on the west bank. As an administrator, he concerned himself with broad lines of policy and for the most part left it to his subordinates to carry it out. Though an emotional man, he could conceal his feelings and be devious. He repeatedly lied his way out of trouble when he was a young officer plotting a military revolt, and as President he pulled off a master stroke of deception when he concealed his preparations for the 1973 war, which began with a surprise attack on Israel. Mr. Sadat had many quirks. He disliked offices and rarely appeared at Abdin Palace, Cairo's equivalent of the White House, preferring to work in his modest villa and in Government-owned rest houses around the country. He wore elegantly cut British-style suits, though even as President he liked to stroll around his native village in a long Arab shirt. He never learned to dance. He could be the high-toned statesman one minute, relishing his associations with other world leaders, and the humdrum homebody the next, always beginning the day with a dose of Eno's Fruit Salts, a British-made aid to digestion. First Steps Mohammed Anwar el-Sadat was born Dec. 25, 1918, in Mit Abul Kom, a cluster of mud-brick buildings in Minufiya Province between Cairo and Alexandria. He was one of the 13 children of Mohammed el-Sadat, a Government clerk, and his part-Sudanese wife, a heritage manifest in the boy's skin, darker than the average Egyptian's. Minufiya lies in the fertile Nile Delta, its irrigated fields producing rich crops of flax and cotton. In those lush surroundings young Anwar's early years passed happily. He wrote later that he had especially relished the sunrise hour ''when I went out with scores of boys and men, young and old, taking our cattle and beasts of burden to the fields.'' His first schooling was at the hands of a kindly Islamic cleric, Sheik Abdul-Hamid, who instilled in him a deep and lasting faith in Islam; as an adult Mr. Sadat bore a dark mark on his forehead, the result of repeatedly touching his head to the floor in prayer. Too Poor to Buy Store Bread In 1925 the father was transferred to Cairo, and the family moved into a small house on the outskirts of the capital, not far from Kubba Palace, one of the residences of Egyptian kings. Anwar gave early evidence of the audacity he repeatedly showed in later life, stealing apricots from the royal orchard. Though the elder Mr. Sadat rose to be a senior clerk, the family was poor, so poor that it could not afford to buy bakery bread. In his memoirs President Sadat said that his early experience of village life, with its ''fraternity, cooperation and love,'' gave him the self-confidence to make his way in the big city, ''It deepened my feeling of inner superiority, a feeling which has never left me and which, I came to realize, is an inner power independent of all material resources.'' In time the proud schoolboy, like other idealistic Egyptians of his generation, came to have a burning political desire: he wanted his country freed of the control of Britain, which had maintained troops there and exercised sway in other ways since the decline of Ottoman Turkish power late in the 19th century. Wanting to play a role in Egypt's future, Mr. Sadat decided to become an officer. Despite his family's lack of influence, he managed to gain admission to the Royal Military Academy, which was once a preserve of the aristocracy but had begun taking cadets from the middle and lower classes. Graduating in 1938, he was assigned to a signal corps installation near the capital. From that central location, as he later told it, he became active in the formation of an organization of officers who wanted to mount an armed revolt against the British presence. Britain as the Main Foe When World War II broke out, Captain Sadat continued to regard Britain as the main enemy and took part in a clandestine attempt to fly a former Chief of Staff, Gen. Aziz el-Masri, out of the country after the Germans had sent a message asking him to proceed to Iraq to work against British interests there. The plane crashed, the attempt failed and Captain Sadat was arrested and interrogated but later was released for lack of evidence. Undeterred, Captain Sadat made contact with two Nazi agents who passed the evenings watching the dancers at the Kit Kat, a leading Cairo nightclub. Their heavy spending brought them under surveillance, they were arrested and interrogated, and they implicated their contact. As a result a swarm of British and Egyptian detectives and intelligence officers searched Captain Sadat's home. His hidden cache of homemade explosives went undetected, b ut he was arrested and sent to a succession of jails. While in jail, he profited from the time by polishing his English and learning German. In 1944 Captain Sadat went on a hunger strike and was transferred to a prison hospital, where he dodged his guard, jumped into a friend's car and escaped. He then grew a beard and lived as a fugitive for a year, helping for a time with work on a resthouse being built for King Farouk, who later was to be ousted by the junta of which Captain Sadat was a part. Free to Plot Once Again With the end of the war came the lifting of the martial-law regulations under which Captain Sadat had been detained, enabling him to resume his real identity in freedom. He also resumed plotting against the British and their Egyptian supporters. After a fellow conspirator assassinated Amin Osman Pasha, an aristocrat who favored the British presence, Captain Sadat was tried as a conspirator and acquitted in 1948. He worked for a while in a Cairo publishing house and in 1950 got himself reinstated in the army. He was soon promoted, thanks to help from the dissident officers' clandestine network, the Free Officers Organization, which had been growing in size and power under the leadership of an old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Nasser. The colonel summoned Major Sadat to a rendezvous in Cairo on July 22, 1952, saying the long-awaited uprising, now focused on King Farouk, was to take place soon. When Nasser did not appear, the major took his wife to the movies. Arriving home late in the evening, they found a note from Nasser saying operations were beginning that night and directing Major Sadat to join the revolutionaries. ''My heart leapt,'' Mr. Sadat recalled in one of his books, ''Revolt on the Nile.'' ''I tore off my civilian clothes and threw on my uniform. In five minutes I was at the wheel of my car.'' At army headquarters, where the rebels had taken control, Nasser told him to take over the Cairo radio at dawn and to broadcast a proclamation announcing the coup. Major Sadat carried out that historic task after waiting for the daily reading from the Koran to be completed. The revolution led to the exile of Farouk, the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt and, before long, the emergence of Nasser as strongman and President. Was Underestimated Although Mr. Sadat filled high posts during the Nasser era, his abilities were underestimated by many influential men in the Nasser entourage. For more than a decade he was given a succession of jobs that were highly visible but of secondary importance. He served as a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, secretary general of an Islamic congress, editor of two newspapers, minister of state in the Cabinet; deputy chairman, chairman and speaker of the National Assembly and chairman of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Council. When Nasser named Mr. Sadat Vice President, it was widely thought that he got the job because it was largely ceremonial and had no real power, but supporters of Mr. Sadat have contended that Nasser chose him to be his successor. Nasser, at odds with many other longtime associates, retained warm relations with Mr. Sadat. Upon Nasser's death of a heart attack, Mr. Sadat, as the only Vice President, automatically became Acting President under the Constitution. In that office and in his first months as President he had to share power in a collective leadership with others; some colleagues supported him for the presidency because they thought he could be manipulated. In those first weeks many Egyptians, especially students and young intellectuals, found it difficult to take him seriously. With his grin, his fancy suits and his frequent hollow-sounding vows to wage war on Israel, he did not seem to be a strong and purposeful leader. Power He showed his strength of will when, after a few months, he moved to consolidate his power by dismissing and imprisoning two of the most powerful figures in the regime, Vice President Ali Sabry, who had close ties with Soviet officials, and Sharawy Gomaa, the Interior Minister, who controlled the secret police. Mr. Sadat enhanced his popularity by displaying an intuitive sense of what the people wanted. He was doing what they wanted when he cut back the powers of the hated secret police, when he ousted the Soviet military experts and when he prepared for war with Israel. Nevertheless, Golda Meir, Israel's Prime Minister when he took office, correctly appraised him, she later wrote, as a ''reasonable man who might soberly consider the benefits'' of ending the confronta tion with Israel. Early in 1973 Mr. Sadat decided to go to war against Israel. He was being criticized by students and others as an ineffective leader, and he concluded that it was necessary to break the Egyptian-Israeli deadlock. ''If we don't take our case into our own hands, there will be no movement,'' he said in an interview. ''The time has come for a shock. The resumption of the battle is now inevitable.'' 'Landmark' for Egyptians After Moscow approved a limited Egyptian invasion of Sinai and after more Soviet arms arrived, Mr. Sadat ordered the attack on Oct. 6. Egyptian troops surged across the canal and Syrian troops struck Israel from their side. In the fighting that followed, the Syrians were thrown back and the Israelis counterattacked fiercely, encircling Suez and carving out a broad bridgehead west of the canal. Despite Israel's strong showing, Mr. Sadat, in his memoirs, maintained that ''the Egyptian military performance was a landmark in world military history'' and that ''if the United States hadn't intervened in the war and fully supported Israel, the situation could have been far different.'' The war spurred Washington to work to ease tensions in the Middle East; Mr. Sadat was soon visited by Mr. Kissinger. The two hit it off from the first and, Mr. Sadat wrote, began ''a relationship of mutual understanding culminating and crystallizing in what we came to describe as a 'peace process.' '' Before long Mr. Kissinger was able to work out a disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel that allowed the Egyptians to take back a strip of Sinai. Mr. Sadat welcomed American participation and said later, ''No one else except the United States can play this role of mediator between two sides that harbor intense hate for one another - a gulf of bad blood, violence and massacres.'' The agreement, signed in January 1974, was followed by months of ''shuttle diplomacy'' by Mr. Kissinger and by a second limited Egyptian-Israeli accord in September 1975. Efforts toward a more comprehensive peace agreement bore no fruit in the next months, however, although the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on Oct. 1, 1977, on principles to govern a Geneva conference on the Middle East. Syria continued to resist such a conference. Need for a New Approach At that point Mr. Sadat, not wanting to let Moscow and Damascus determine the pace of events, decided that a new approach was needed. Disregarding objections from his advi sers, he made the trip to Jerusalem. He told the Israeli Parliment that Egypt's willingness to ''welcome you among us'' amounted to ''a decisive historical change,'' but he continued to insist that the Israelis withdraw from occupied Arab land and recognize what he call ed the rights of the Palestinians. He claimed a new-found friendship with Mr. Begin and set in motion the first high-level Egyptian-Israeli peace talks. When Mr. Sadat returned to Cairo, he told his people that ''all barriers of doubt, mistrust and fear were shattered.'' But the negotiations bogged down over differences on the Palestinians and other issues; by January 1978 they were deadlocked, with Mr. Sadat denouncing the Israelis as stiff-necked. That deadlock prevailed until Mr. Sadat met with Mr. Begin and President Carter in September 1978 at the Camp David conference called by Mr. Carter. Two weeks of talks produced signed agreements on what was called ''a framework for peace.'' After further efforts Mr. Carter flew to Jerusalem and then to Cairo on March 13, 1979, with compromise proposals to break yet another deadlock, and Mr. Sadat approved them quickly in a meeting at a Cairo airport. Later that month Mr. Sadat and Mr. Begin signed the treaty, ending 30 years of Egyptian-Israeli confrontation. ''Let us work together,'' Mr. Sadat said, paraphrasing the Prophet Isaiah, ''until the day comes when they beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.'' In the hard-line Arab protest against the treaty, 17 Arab nations adopted political and economic sanctions against his Government. Yet his isolation in the Arab world did not undercut his domestic support; he deftly reaped political profit from the isolation by underscoring the idea, widespread in Egypt, that other Arabs had grown wealthy while the Egyptians had borne the burden of the four wars. Economy Displayed Strength His popularity benefited also from the fairly strong condition of the economy, which had seemed on the brink of disaster after Egypt's catastrophic defeat in the 1967 war. By late 1979 the economic growth rate had reached 9 percent a year and was one of the highest in the developing world, thanks largely to more than $1 billion a year in American aid. President Sadat's relations with the Americans and the Israelis, despite some intense friction, remained relatively harmonious in the months after the signing of the treaty. That good will paid off when, as a gesture of friendship, Mr. Begin fulfilled one provision of the treaty ahead of time, returning a 580-square-mile tract of Sinai to Egypt on Nov. 15, 1979, instead of on Jan. 25, as scheduled. Yet no real progress was made in months of Egyptian-Israeli negotiations on home rule for the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Early in 1980 Mr. Sadat held inconclusive talks with Mr. Begin at Aswan, in upper Egypt. Israeli forces withdrew from more of Sinai, leaving two-thirds of the area evacuated. The Israeli-Egyptian border was declared open, and the two countries exchanged ambassadors. In March 1980 Mr. Sadat drew new criticism at home and in unfriendly Arab capitals when the deposed Shah of Iran, who was ill, moved to Cairo, accepting a longstanding invitation. As the new decade got under way, President Sadat seemed confident of his policies, but events seemed to have taken a somewhat unfavorable turn. Cairo's isolation in the Arab world and elsewhere in the third world was galling, and the almost total reliance on Washington for food, aid and weapons was a source of concern.Inflation was running at a rate of 30 percent a year, there were signs of increasing repression, and Israel's policy of multiplying settlements on the occupied West Bank intensified pessimism. In April 1980 President Sadat visited Washington to discuss the Israeli settlements with President Carter. From there he denounced the Israeli policy as ''unfounded, ill-conceived and illegal.'' Dissent In the final months of Mr. Sadat's life, as his intricate and sometimes stormy dialogue with Israel continued, there were repeated expressions of internal opposition to his rule. They continued, and mounted, despite his general popularity and his continued use of such means as government food-subsidies to dampen disconent. Early this year Egypt's leftist National Unionist Progressive Party publicly denounced Mr. Sadat's policies toward Israel. ''This so-called normalization with the Israeli enemy was done at the expense of the Arabs and was opposed by a growing number of Egyptians,'' a party statement said. In June a Government prosecutor said a former Egyptian Chief of Staff, Lieut. Gen. Saad Eddin el-Shazli, and 18 other Egyptian dissidents living abroad had plotted to overthrow Mr. Sadat. They were said to have been given $2.8 million by Libya at Syria's urging. And the head of the Egyptian Bar Association complained that Mr. Sadat's regime was trying to dismember the as sociation's leadership because it had opposed the peace treaty with Israel. Yet Mr. Sadat continued to give much of his attention to foreign affairs. In June he met inconclusively with Mr. Begin, for the first time in 17 months. In the meeting in an abandoned restaurant at Sharm el Sheik in Sinai, the Israeli leader rejected Mr. Sadat's appeal to halt Israeli attacks on Palestinian guerrilla bases in Lebanon. Denounced Bombing of Iraq A few days later Mr. Sadat was denouncing Israel for its bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor, which he called an ''unlawful, provocative'' act. It was embarrassing to him because Mr. Begin had told him nothing about it. On Aug. 3 Egypt and Israel signed an agremeent establishing a 2,500-member international peacekeeping force in Sinai to police their peace treaty. On Aug. 5 and 6 Mr. Sadat held friendly but inconclusive talks with President Reagan in Washington. And on Aug. 25 and 26 he and Mr. Begin met yet again, this time in the Egyptian port of Alexandria, to try to resolve problems that had delayed normalization of relations. But then Mr. Sadat turned his full attention to internal affairs, evidently acting in response to information about the extent of dissidence in his perennially unstable land. Citing Moslem and other opposition to his regime, he departed markedly from the largely velvet-glove treatment of opponents that had characterized his 11 years of rule. He cracked down hard, detaining 1,600 opponents, mostly Moslem militants, partly in response to bloody rioting in June between Moslems and members of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority. After a hastily called referendum, his Government reported that 99.45 percent of the voters endorsed its measures to curb secular as well as religious dissidence. Moslem dissidents resented the rapprochement with Israel and wanted a more Islamic cast to Egypt's government. 'Suffering' From Democracy At a news conference Sept. 9, Mr. Sadat made a wry reference to his country's heritage of violence and to the opposition to his rule. To a foreign reporter who asked an impertinent question, he said, ''In other times I would have shot you, but it is democracy I am really suffering from as much as I am suffering from the opposition.'' Also last month Mr. Sadat accused a dozen former Egyptian officials of ''conniving'' with the Soviet Union to destabilize his Government. He ordered the expulsion of more than 1,000 Soviet citizens, including the Soviet Ambassador, Vladimir P. Polyakov. The Government-supervised Egyptian press reported that Egyptian intelligence had uncovered anti-Government plotting by Soviet agents in league with Egyptian religious extremists, leftists, Nasserites, educators, journalists and others. Later in the month - even as officials of Egypt, Israel and the United States held talks in Cairo seeking a plan for self-rule for Palestinians - Mr. Sadat's Government took further action to quell dissidence. Among other measures, uniformed guards in university campuses were reinforced. A sweeping investigation of the bureaucracy was decreed. Said Indiscipline Had Ended In a widely quoted speech, Mr. Sadat asserted, in what proved to be a display of overconfidence, that all of Egypt's internal indiscipline had come to a halt. ''Lack of discipline in any way or form,'' he said, in a two-hour televised address, ''in the streets, in the Government, in the university, in the secondary schools, in the factory, in the public sector, in the private sector, this all has ended, it has ended.'' In Israel, however, a long-time observer of Mr. Sadat was already speaking of the possibility that his work might be snuffed out. The Israeli Chief of Staff, Lieut. Gen. Raphael Eitan, said bleakly, ''There are troubles in Egypt, and it is possible that President Sadat will go and everything will come to an end.'' Mr. Sadat was divorced from his first wife, who was from his native village; they had three daughters. His second wife, Jihan, has played a strong role in public affairs, particularly concerning the condition of women and children. The four children of his second marriage are a son, Gamal, named for Nasser, and three daughters, Lubna, Noha and Jihan. ''In Egypt, personalities have always been more important than political programs.'' - ''Revolt on the Nile,'' 1957. ''The situation here - mark my words - will be worse than Vietnam.'' - In a magazine interview, July 1973. ''We have always felt the sympathy of the world, but we would prefer the respect of the world to sympathy without respect.'' - In a speech to the People's Assembly after the first attack of the Yom Kippur war, Oct. 6, 1973. ''Let every girl, let every woman, let every mother here - and there in my country - know we shall solve all our problems through negotiations around the table rather than starting war.'' - During his visit to Israel, November 1977. ''I have a great ally in Israel that I depend upon. Do you know who? The Israeli mother.'' - Commenting on the vote of approval by Israel's Parliament of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, March 22, 1979. ''In all the steps I took I was not performing a personal mission. I was merely expressing the will of a nation. I am proud of my people and of belonging to them. ''Today a new dawn is emerging out of the darkness of the past. ''Let us work together until the day comes when they beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.'' - At the peace treaty signing between Egypt and Israel at the White House, March 26, 1979. ''There will be no barriers between our peoples, no more anxiety or insecurity, not more suffering or suspicion.'' - Meeting with Menachem Begin at Beersheba, May 27, 1979. ''It is democracy I am really suffering from as much as I am suffering from the opposition.'' -Speaking to foreign journalists of unrest in Egypt, Sept. 9, 1981.