Hannah Arendt Quotes

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

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It's the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested.

A process of genocide is being carried out before the eyes of the world.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

Mr. Speaker, genocide is the most potent of all crimes against humanity because it is an effort to systematically wipe out a people and a culture as well as individual lives.

I don't think nations can stand aside for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

I believe the only time when we can call for intervention is when there is an ongoing genocide.

Saddam has committed many crimes against humanity and against his own people.

Once genocide is under way, it is unlikely that anything but military force will end the horror.

Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime. The world is diminished by the experience.

Genocide is not war! It is more dangerous than war!

This ain't rock 'n' roll. This is genocide!

Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.

The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a failure of humanity as a whole.

Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant, there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity.

Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . .

The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

'Never again' is the rallying cry for all who believe that mankind must speak out against genocide.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

Yet, only years after the Nazi-era, millions were sent to their deaths in places such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and the world once again took too long to act.

I certainly think that another Holocaust can happen again. It did already occur; think of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'

When there are no gas chambers, no barbed wire, and no concentration camps, many don't recognize the perpetration of new genocides and other targeted mass atrocity crimes because they may not look the same.

We receive reports now on a daily basis from our own people on the ground in Darfur on widespread atrocities and grave violations of human rights against the civilian population.