Raphael Lemkin Quotes

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

They're criminals, they brutalized Afghanistan, they killed our people, they destroyed our land.

I have issued the command, and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death's-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the East, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

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

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

Use a proper degree of terror …kill evey man Kaffir…if possible the Chief should be destroyed.

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

I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.

All Indian men of that tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them…. If the Indians send in a flag of truce say to the bearer ... that you have been sent to punish them for their treachery and their crimes. That you have no power to make peace, that you are there to kill them wherever you can find them.

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.

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

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.

Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.

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

I became interested in genocide, because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.

The Coalition for International Justice estimated that 450,000 people in Darfur have died since the deadly genocide began some three years ago.

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.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

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.

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

Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale?

Many instances of persecution and killing have occurred in countries with atrocious human rights records such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.