Genocide Quotes

“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
― elie wiesel

“My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.”
― Chief Seattle, Chief Seattle's Speech (1854)

“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”
― Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems

“...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.

In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”
― Robert Higgs

“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!
They want us to hate.
They want us to hate 'the other'.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!
They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!
They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that we will never be afraid,
we will never hate
and we will never be silent
for life is ours!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“My faceless neighbor spoke up:

“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”

I exploded:

“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?
His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:

“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“I'm from the Lenape Tribe.
There're no full blooded Lenape alive. Interracial is assimilatory genocide, especially for Indiginous and Minorities worldwide.
Especially when specific suggestion on a mass scale is applied. For many tribes, Interracial was the only way to survive.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“If I look at the mass I will never act.”
― Mother Teresa

“It is not power that corrupts but fear.”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.”
― Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany

“Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region.

The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.”
― Noam Chomsky

“ওরা আমার ছেলেটাকে মেরে ফেলেছে হিরোশিমায়। আমার মাকে খুন করেছে জেরুজালেমের রাস্তায়। আমার বোনটা এক সাদা কুত্তার বাড়িতে বাঁদি ছিলো। তার প্রভু তাকে ধর্ষণ করে মেরেছে আফ্রিকাতে। আমার বাবাকে হত্যা করে মেরেছে ভিয়েতনামে। আর আমার ভাই, তাকে ফাঁসীতে ঝুলিয়ে মেরেছে ওরা। কারণ সে মানুষকে ভীষণ ভালোবাসতো।”
― Zahir Raihan, আর কতদিন

“The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.”
― A.E. Samaan

“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...”
― Black Elk

“Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

“Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Le fondamentalisme se manifeste sous différentes formes et couleurs. Les croyances de 'la vérité absolue' et de 'la seule voie' du salut, en font partie.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“How could she compare the lives lost? One genocide against another—how did they balance on the scale of justice? And who was she, to imagine that she could make that comparison?”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitudes. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles. We may have loved, but never well enough. We never truly knew ourselves. We forgot the world; now it has forgotten us.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,
and if one says that one is not good enough to have a job that is a solid quality job, if one is not
good enough to have access to public accommodations, if one is not good enough to have the
right to vote, if one is not good enough to live next door to him, if one is not good enough to
marry his daughter because of his race. Then at that moment, that person is saying that that
person who is not good to do all of this is not fit to exist or to live. And that is the ultimate logic of racism.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”
― Percival Everett, The Trees

“The ones who claim the universe is a dark forest where you either kill or be killed, using safety and security as excuses to maintain the status quo of archaic brains no longer useful in progressive, advanced societies.

In my homeland, there was a time when the Virunga National Park wasn’t shrouded in darkness, but was the living, breathing heart of the Congo, with its rich biodiversity and ecological beauty. Non-human hearts of every shape and size shared its gifts. Our forests were never dark before the greed of men came to cast a shadow. Even the cunning leopard, stealthy and powerful, only claimed the life it needed to sustain itself. You may belong in a dark forest, but our worlds and our universes are not one, so get out of our way! Our forests are big hearted and so are we.”
― Alexandra Almeida, Is Neurocide the Same as Genocide? : And Other Dangerous Ideas

“Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Jimmy said, "We survived slavery. Think about that. Not because we were strong. The American Indians were strong, and they were on their own land. But they have not survived genocide. You know how we survived?"

I said nothing.

"We put surviving into our poems and into our songs. We put it into our folk tales. We danced surviving in Congo Square in New Orleans and put it in our pots when we cooked pinto beans. We wore surviving on our backs when we clothed ourselves in the colors of the rainbow. We were pulled down so low we could hardly lift our eyes, so we knew, if we wanted to survive, we had better lift our own spirits. So we laughed whenever we got the chance.”
― Maya Angelou, A Song Flung Up to Heaven

“...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life...”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Hutu power had presided over one of the most outrageous crimes in a century of seemingly relentless mass political murder, and the only way to get away with it was to continue to play the victim.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families