Martti Ahtisaari Quotes

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

I remember when we were in Egypt as refugees. It was tough, but there was always hope - hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Educate yourself, learn about what refugees face when they don't have homes, after they have lost everything.

I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.

I grew up in a refugee camp. Thirty years. This so-called human-rights world didn't ask me what was happening for me to be there 30 years.

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

I remember when I was a kid, as a refugee in Egypt, every day, there was always a hope that we'd get to leave tomorrow and we'd get to go somewhere.

When we were in Egypt, we were refugees. My family and I were homeless. For five years, out of all of the countries in the world that my father was contacting, the only one that took us in was England.

When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.

If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

People have been born in refugee camps and they are getting tired of that.

Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again.

Displacement is very tough on the people who are displaced and for the country that is hosting them.

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

I've identified all my life with refugees.

Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.

I was the child of refugees.

I've seen mothers and children really being vulnerable in the refugee camps; it's supposed to be temporary, but they end up having children who have grown up in refugee camps.

While migration is inevitable, the fact remains that most people leave their homes to escape violence and the certain persecution that comes from it.

I arrived in this country as a refugee child with my sister and my mother.

My parents left Germany in a very, very precarious way.

The year when I left my country, there was still peace. The year after, the war broke out, a lot of people lost their homes, lost their families. When I go back 20 years later I still find people living in refugee camps. So I tried to help them find homes.