John Irving Quotes

When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.

If we stand idly by while states legalize bigotry, we are responsible for allowing it to happen.

As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

Violence and racism are bad. Whenever they occur they are to be condemned and we should not turn a blind eye to them.

The reason I have been so outspoken on antisemitism is that racism is racism - and my family have been victims of it.

Anti-Semitism or discrimination of any kind has no place in our society.

I do not want to have anything to do with anybody who is racist or bigoted or anti-Semitic.

The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim.

It's not hard to look at our own world and draw parallels between 9/11, for example, and how Muslims are viewed or treated by North American culture since then. Just to see the way fear can breed hatred and intolerance for people who aren't the same as us - and that's certainly part of what's at the heart of 'Descender.'

No people in the history of the world have ever been so misunderstood, so misjudged, and so cruelly maligned.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.

You cannot stoke the fires of prejudice against German people and then not find that somewhere, sometime down the road it doesn't discharge.

Intolerance has been the curse of our country.

Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death.

I have never been on the receiving end of a hate crime, or even a disparaging remark to my face.

Bigotry should never be sanctioned, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

I'm not a racist, and I'm not a murderer.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.

Where anti-Semitism persists, the well being of all our people is at risk.

When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It's a display of terrible intolerance.

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.

… musty deposits of 2000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness.