George Saunders Quotes

In the trial of Saddam Hussein on Tuesday, witnesses emotionally testified about the abuse the former dictator inflicted on them. Afterward, a tearful Saddam said, 'Ah, good times.'

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

Saddam is a war criminal and there are no two people who can argue over this.

You agreed with the Dear Leader or you died or ended up in Camp 913.

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

The once all-powerful ruler of Iraq was found in a hole, and now sits in a prison cell.

It is beyond dispute that Saddam Hussein is a menace.

Men like Hitler and Stalin and their immediate lieutenants cannot plead in defence of their actions that these were justified by the accepted values of that time.

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.

I think the world is much better off without Saddam Hussein than with him.

I hate to say it but I was glad when they shot him. I don’t believe in terrorism or assassination but he could have become the American dictator.

When Saddam Hussein buried 300,000 Shiites and Kurds alive, we did not hear a single Muslim protesting. Your silence served to acknowledge the legitimacy of these killings

Saddam Hussein was perhaps the most bloodthirsty dictator after Hitler and Stalin. We can defend the oil of Kuwait, but not the people of Iraq.

Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil.

Suharto, the genocidal kleptocrat who was one of the 20th Century’s worst mass murderers and whose 1960s’ slaughter of anywhere up to a million “Communists” was actively aided and abetted by the US Central Intelligence Agency

He [Rafael Trujillo] had his torture chambers. He had his political assassinations. But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works, and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.

Stalin could occasionally make Hitler look like a Boy Scout.

You can’t kill your own people and survive very long.

The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe—three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins. He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty. He was a force for evil in the world. His passing, his defeat—a boon to mankind. But thousands died that it might be so. The price for ridding society of bad is always high. Love, Daddy

He’s [Bashar al-Assad, Syrian President] a different kind of bloodthirsty dictator, the kind who shops on line on his iPad. He’s sort of Arab Dictator 2.0

Assad is unquestionably guilty of the most grievous fault and has inflicted horrors upon his people.

There are African leaders who have the dangerous habit of leading their people into an abyss. In Rwanda we've had presidents who killed. The one million people who died here were, to a certain extent, victims of their leader, President Juvénal Habyarimana, who died in a plane crash before the genocide began. He contributed to all that. The man who took over from him was running around ordering people to kill. If this president came back and landed in my hands, I would have him arrested and tried. Unfortunately, he died a natural death.

I don't think anyone would disagree with the conclusion that Saddam [Hussein] was a terrible dictator. He had gassed his own people and his neighbors. He had killed thousands of people, and he had started a couple of wars and destroyed his country.

The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush.

The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.