Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

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

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

The greatest and the most horrible crime that has ever been committed in the history of the whole world.

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

Those who are innocent today may be guilty tomorrow.

Everywhere the Bulgarians have passed, one sees only blood, dishonor and ruin. It is a refinement of cruelty which the imagination refuses to comprehend.

Exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese... and purify the masses of the [Cambodian] people.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

The Russians we captured at Tannenberg should be herded into the Courland Peninsula on the Baltic and starved to death.

Wars of extermination are demoralizing and wicked.

For most of history, genocide was just something governments did and nobody blinked.

The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.

Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man ... , keep alive for yourselves.

It was a total and absolute surprise to find out that what was inside the concentration camps was a sea of skeletons. What is clear to me, therefore, is that while the tragedy of war grinds on, the contemporary aesthetics of the tragedy seem not only confused but, in some way, suspicious.

The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books.

There is nothing more personal than your values. What you will and won't do to get ahead, the lines you will and won't cross to win, whom you will and won't step on for personal gain, are at the very core of your code of honor. And your code of honor determines your character. And your character is who you are. Behind closed doors. When nobody is watching.

When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Wherever moral ambition exists, there right exists. And moral ambition itself must be presumed present in subconsciousness, even when the conscious self seems to reject it, so long as society has resources for bringing it into action; in much the same way that the life-saver presumes life to exist in the drowned man until he has exhausted his resources for recovering respiration.

Holocaust Memorial Day is intended as an inclusive commemoration of all the individuals and communities who suffered as a result of the Holocaust - not only Jews, but also Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, political prisoners and dozens of ethnic and other minorities.

Let's talk about the other story: the women raped and killed. I don't believe it. Certainly there was no lack of excesses, but General Tikka Khan says that in those months he often invited the population to report abuses to him directly.

The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.