Genocide Quotes

“Abortion should be listed as a weapon of mass destruction against the voiceless.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.”
― Philip G Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect

“Behold, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!

Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.

Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.

We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: 'First kill me before you take possession of my land”
― Sitting Bull

“What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts.

And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.”
― Greta Christina

“..each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”
― Bill Clinton

“The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

“Even among Sedlacek's own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railroads, and enormous cubic footage of cargo space, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research-and-development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Let us change a letter
from the word ‘EVIL’
Make it 'Ivil'
as long as 'Israel' remains so…
Let us protect the letter ‘P’
for Prayers..
for PALESTINE...
for Peace..”
― Munia Khan

“Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aun las más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“There were waves of genocide that overcame indigenous populations of Oceania and do we have a library of books or films to tell our story? No. We have tourist hula shows and commercials where the “natives” tend to tourists like indentured servants with plastic, lifeless smiles. It’s not such a charming picture, is it? The truth is ugly, but so is ignorance or denial of such atrocities and pain.”
― M.B. Dallocchio, Quixote in Ramadi: An Indigenous Account of Imperialism

“Strain on the community -- That's a ridiculous arguement. Then nobody in the world should have children. I think asking people not to have children is just another form of genocide.”
― Rebecca Lee, Bobcat and Other Stories

“Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right.   Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“Do not tell me that it is not God-like to get angry or go into a fit of rage. God himself when enraged will grasp a star and hurl it through the heavens. And at night, you can see bits of the star flashing through the sky, fallen apart merely by the shear force of which it was thrown. Know when He is angry and stay out of His way… And the same holds true for my grandson.” Yervant Yacoubian.”
― Keri Topouzian, A Perfect Armenian

“As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.”
― Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

“I have argued elsewhere (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence [2005]) that we need to treat ethics in biblical texts just as we treat ethics in any other works of ancient literature. It is a vacuous exercise to pick and choose which atrocities were really ordained by any gods and which were not. We should have a zero-tolerance view of any text or collection of texts that at any time endorses genocide, misogyny, and other atrocities. We always judge ancient texts by modern ethical standards, and the Bible should not be treated differently.”
― Hector Avalos

“Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.”
― Paul Rusesabagina, An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography

“It wasn't my choice to write this story...it was my responsibility.”
― Rhonda Fink-Whitman, 94 Maidens

“We must recognize that if we feel helpless when facing the record of human depravity, there was always a point at which any particular scene of madness could have been stopped.”
― Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps

“Their disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the world.”
― Henry Clay

“It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today .... We should literally replace all factors responsible for selection in a natural and free life .... In prehistoric times of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness, etc. was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organization; otherwise, humanity will, for lack of selective factors, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication.”
― Konrad Lorenz

“لم تتوحد الوحوش على جسد كما توحدت على الجسد الفلسطيني، فلم يمر عام واحد في تاريخ الشعب الفلسطيني الحديث دون مذبحة واستخدموا فيها كل أدوات القتل التي انعرفت منذ تطور الحيوان إلى إنسان حتى عودة الحيوان إليه: البلطة، السكين، البندقية، المدفعية، الصواريخ، والأسلحة الالكترونية .
غير أن الطائر الأخضر يعاود الانبعاث في كل مرة ,ويصوغ اسطورتة الجديدة ,فبأي سلاح يقاتل هؤلاء الفتيان المحاصرون دائمًا، المحاصرون في شارع أو بناية أو خندق؛ المحاصرون في هُويَّة؟.
سلاحهم الوحيد هو الجنون، والجنون، والجنون :جنون الحياة، جنون اليأس، وجُنون العزلة.”
― محمود درويش

“If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.”
― O'Brien Edna

“Struggle for justice invariably alters the base culture. So did the long Tamil Eelam struggle. Its crystallization was the Vanni society during the last years of LTTE. My four years experience in Vanni also gave me a unique opportunity to see firsthand the devastating truth about the ways of the powerful on this globe - about which I and many other Tamils have puzzled over for many years. For us Tamils of Tamil Eelam it is a new source of power through knowing. It is also our proud history.”
― N Malathy

“Hvis du tar til orde for at Europa en gang skal bli fritt for muslimer, tar du samtidig til orde, i beste fall, for en tvangsdeportering av mer enn femti millioner mennesker vekk fra det europeiske kontinentet. I verste fall tar du til orde for voldshandlinger mot en religiøs gruppering som allerede er sterkt utsatt for fordommer og hets. Hvis målet ditt er at islam skal utryddes fra Europa, kan du ikke samtidig påstå at du er fredelig sjel som aldri har hatt som formål å skade noen. Du må skjønne at politikken du forfekter faktisk handler om mennesker. Og du må tåle å bli møtt med motargumenter. At noen motsier argumentene dine betyr ikke at du knebles. Det betyr at du deltar i debatten.”
― Trine Skei Grande, Ytringsfrihet: 10 essays

“The one ring, to rule them all’? Sounds very far-fetched to me!”
― Graham Downs, Heritage of Deceit

“For decades afterwards, I punished myself with images of Sofia standing
naked in the snow, shivering, clutching a chunk of cement that a guard had told her was soap, in the worst winter Poland has ever known. But as I stared at the empty train tracks and thought of the stationmaster making the schoolyard slash across his throat, I had no idea what he was talking about. I could not have conjured up the kind of man who would be willing to design an oven that would be economically fueled by the fat of the men, women and children it was burning. I would not have believed that these same engineers would find other men willing to carry out their monstrous plans. I, too, would have dismissed it as propaganda, that one kind of human being could industriously collect and kill six million of another kind of human being. Somewhere along the line, there would have to be someone who said no.

Forgive me, Sofia. Forgive me, Isaiah. I did not know.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light

“• Looking backward should never divert our path to one of hatred and bitterness, for those steps lead nowhere but to destruction. To live in hatred is to miss the point of living.”
― Mari Serebrov, Mama Namibia