“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
― Elie Wiesel

 

“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

 

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

 

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

 

“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

 

“We are preaching hope, standing on the bones of the past.”
― John Rucyahana, The Bishop of Rwanda: Finding Forgiveness Amidst a Pile of Bones

 

“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

 

“If human is capable of conducting genocide,
no need for an asteroid to wipe out dinosaurs.”
― Toba Beta

 

“She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

 

“As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I’ve never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That’s why I supported Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot’s regime, and Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.”
― José Ramos-Horta, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq

 

“The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison – just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral.
We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

 

“In general, those who resort to mass murder on a collective scale always put forward the justification that they acted on behalf of the nation.”
― Taner Akçam

 

“No actions by gangs or individuals can justify the deaths of eight hundred thousand people.”
― Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility