Top 70 Genocide Quotes

Going to Cambodia to cover the genocide trials, I did read a lot about the Khmer Rouge; I read a lot about the country and its history.

If we do a little bit of insight into history, how many times have there been people doing hate discourse, blaming everything on a certain group of people. That really is the genesis of genocide, where it kind of sparks.

All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don’t show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don’t use electricity.

We were not realizing that, with just a machete, you can do a genocide.

But if Russia is to be part of this larger zone of peace it cannot bring into it its imperial baggage. It cannot bring into it a policy of genocide against the Chechens, and cannot kill journalists, and it cannot repress the mass media.

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

At the October 1933 proceedings of the League of Nations in Madrid, Lemkin mounted a valiant effort to persuade the gathered ambassadors to define and agree to punish the crime of what we now call genocide. He failed.

I’m half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father – like many sons and daughters of immigrants – wanted to be as ‘American’ as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?

What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands.

Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.

When readers close the covers on ‘Running the Rift,’ I want them to understand that it is not a genocide novel but rather a story of hope and rebirth.

It’s not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven’t dealt with it.

‘Avatar’ imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America’s foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.

One of the things that a president needs in the face of genocide is resolve.

Whoever says that sanctions will only deteriorate the situations of blacks in South Africa does not know the criminal, murderous character of genocide that represents the system of apartheid.

Quibbling over the definition of genocide does nothing but help obscure the long history of vicious racism and undeniable suffering of Indigenous people in this country. It’s bad enough whatever you want to call it.

Acumen Fund is my prayer in response to genocide and what happened in Rwanda.

We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists… to understand how those evil things came about.

Israel is now sustaining a war for its own existence. A nation defending its citizens against terrorist bombings and a military and diplomatic onslaught by an array of Arab foes is practicing survival, not genocide.

I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.

The legacy of the Armenian Genocide is woven into the fabric of America.

Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.

Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences – for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal – Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial.

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century’s first genocide – the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don’t know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars.

You have to understand what caused genocide to happen. Or it will happen again.

Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics – one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.

Genocide is an attempt to exterminate a people, not to alter their behavior.

When genocide is committed, it must be seen. People must look at it with open eyes, not minimize its impact.

The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.

I’m against genocide. I’m against fascism. I’m willing to fight against them so that, in that sense, I think one can still be committed to justice and committed to peace but recognize the circumstances under which one does have to fight.

If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic.

There is no ethnic cleansing in Bahrain, no mass genocide, no policy of killing innocent people.

We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that ‘9/11’? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we’d give that huge event a different name.

If Turkey is prepared to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, then its leaders can proceed immediately to direct dialogue with its counterparts in Armenia to define a common vision for the future.

Honoring the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, in which more than two million Ukrainian Jews died, Ukraine calls on Israel to also recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

I think the only value of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ is the fact that it keeps the Rwandan genocide alive, but as far as content, it’s Hollywood.

Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.

For us, genocide was the gas chamber – what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.

As a Republican, I voted with President Clinton consistently in our efforts to bail out our European friends in Kosovo to stop genocide. I am proud of those votes. I am proud of President Clinton for that.

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

Distorting the history of World War II, denying the crimes of genocide and the Holocaust as well as an instrumental use of Auschwitz to attain any given goal is tantamount to desecration of the memory of the victims whose ashes are scattered here.

Iran is the only country in the world that’s threatening to erase another country from the map as part of a collective genocide.

I am the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. My mother is a survivor of both polio and of the Igbo genocide during her country’s civil war in the late 1960s.

When you ask people what they think of Africa, they think of AIDS, genocide, disasters, famine.

If there’s a clear genocide somewhere, don’t we really want to positively impact that kind of a situation? Isn’t that what we’re all about? Isn’t that what we’ve always been about?

My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.

I promised never to let the Rwandan Genocide die because I knew the Rwandans didn’t have much power internationally and certainly didn’t have the resources. I felt it was my duty having witnessed it, and having stayed to witness it, that I had to talk about it and keep it going.

‘Capitalism’ is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.

A journey through the Mediterranean is not only inspiring and stimulating, it is also humbling. The men and women who created antique treasures for us to marvel at had to deal with plague, genocide, a world without writing, iron tools, or penicillin – and yet they made something extraordinary of their life and times.

We must win in Iraq. If we withdraw, there will be chaos; there will be genocide; and they will follow us home.