Top 110 Refugee Quotes

Jordan is the only Arab state that has provided citizenship to Palestinian refugees and integrated them. But something has to be done about the Palestinians living in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.

We need to hit pause, and possibly reset, as we think about this whole Syrian refugee resettlement issue.

My favorite charity is the Women’s Refugee Commission and the Nomi network.

My family had to live in Vienna for three months, then in Italy for another nine, while we waited for refugee status.

It is unacceptable for a woman to be rescued from captivity from ISIS to come and not have a place to live, to be put in refugee camps.

We want to build a flagship refugee home. And I’m going to establish a charity for traumatized children.

Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.

I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.

In Turkey, there are no ‘refugee camps.’ There are Turkish ‘temporary protection shelters.’ The Kurdis had no papers, no UNHCR refugee designations, and no passports, and therefore did not qualify for exit visas.

I’m going to build a refugee home together with friends.

If we do not change our negative habits toward climate change, we can count on worldwide disruptions in food production, resulting in mass migration, refugee crises and increased conflict over scarce natural resources like water and farm land. This is a recipe for major security problems.

President Obama has argued there isn’t a threat of terrorism from the U.S. refugee program because for individuals who apply it takes two years, ‘heavy vetting’ and is a relatively long process. It doesn’t matter. Jihad is patient, and as ISIS has pledged, it will do whatever it takes to get the job done.

If you’re an Islamic terrorist, probably the last program I’d use to try to get into this country is the refugee program.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

I probably wouldn’t have made it this far if I were a refugee.

My father was from East Bengal. Having lost everything to the Partition, he came as a refugee.

I had jobs from the age of 14, when I arrived in London as a refugee. Aged 17, I’d get up at 4 A.M. to work as a cleaner before school. It wasn’t pleasant.

‘The Odyssey’ is a great poem to refugee-dom… Odysseus is not entirely a refugee… he’s somebody who’s blown off course. The entire book is an exploration of that theme… I reread it every year… That’s not as surprising as it sounds, because it’s a rip-roaring book.

Many people told me not to call the book ‘… Refugee’ because Aussies won’t buy it. I told them I have faith in Aussies, and it makes me a proud Aussie to see that the title hasn’t hurt the book.

What mattered about Alan Kurdi’s photograph was that it made Canadians very angry, and the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats ended up competing with each other over which party was offering the most generous refugee policy.

I grew up in a refugee camp. Thirty years. This so-called human-rights world didn’t ask me what was happening for me to be there 30 years.

Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time.

Several hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs live in slums known as refugee camps in Gaza, Judea, and Somalia. Attempts by Israel to rehabilitate and oust them have been defeated by Arab objections. Nor has their fate been any better in Arab states.

The refugee problem is definitely a disaster for the entire region. Putin – the refugee problem in Chechnya was largely contained inside of Russia itself although there were tens of thousands of Chechens who sought refuge across Europe. Putin wasn’t swayed by that issue when it came to Chechnya.

In 1995, the Clinton Administration reached an agreement with Cuban government that any refugee caught at sea would be sent back to Cuba while any refugee who reaches the United States shores would be allowed to begin the process to citizenship after one year.

The hardship of living in a refugee camp made me psychologically strong.

We must set up large refugee camps outside the E.U. with armed security and financial support provided by the Union.

I take ISIS at its word. When they said, in their words, ‘We’ll use and exploit the refugee crisis to infiltrate the West,’ that concerns me.

I get to say I was alive when the first Palestinian woman went to Congress. I was alive when the first Somali woman, in a hijab, who’s black and Muslim – she’s literally an immigrant, a refugee, black and Muslim and a woman and progressive.

I love ‘Exit West’ by Mohsin Hamid. It’s a magical realism retelling of the refugee experience, where people find these magical doors that transport them to another country.

While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist. And for me, they must.

My first experience in the Netherlands was very pleasant, extremely pleasant. I mean, I got my residence permit, refugee status, within four weeks of arrival. People treated me extremely well.

That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.

I was born in India, and we came from a poor family and lived in a rural village. My dad came over to Canada as a refugee, and years later, we were able to join him.

My mom is a Sikh immigrant born in a refugee camp. My Irish-Swedish-Norwegian-Danish-English-American dad grew up Baptist.

In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. But I soon learned it’s not only extremely difficult, it’s also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants.

The political solutions to the refugee crisis may be complex, but that does not mean we should abandon our humanity. We should not close our hearts, retreat behind walls, real or imagined, or ignore the pressing moral imperative to provide assistance and sanctuary for some of the world’s most desperate people.

My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they’re desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.

My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he’d be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.

Before I became a SEAL, I’d done humanitarian work around the world – with refugee families in Bosnia, with unaccompanied children in Rwanda, with kids who lost limbs to land mines in Cambodia.

Terrorism and the refugee crisis have changed the political mood in the West and brought the extreme right to prominence there.

Since when can somebody tell me a time or a case where there has been a Syrian refugee in this country who has committed an act of terror?

My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

I am a refugee: my parents fled Chile under Pinochet in 1976 when I was 9 months old, and my parents were able to start from nothing and make lives for themselves in the United States.

I know what it’s like when you are a refugee, living on the mercy of others and having to adjust.

Poland is ready to admit every refugee who arrives in Poland, fleeing the war in the Middle East, no matter their faith or economic status, provided that they comply with our legal regulations and want to stay in our country.

I hate light… I feel like at night, it’s safer. If anything happens, there’s a way to hide at night. Another thing I hate about light is it reminds me about being in a refugee camp and being outside.

My experience as a refugee had made me strong; I could survive anything, even the world of fashion.

I arrived in this country as a refugee child with my sister and my mother.

As the son of a Cuban refugee and cousin and nephew to many Cubans on the island, I cringe when Americans visit Cuba for a fun island vacation.

If I’m doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I’ll go to her tent; I’ll follow her when she’s working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.