Benazir Bhutto Quotes

One man’s exile is but a drop in the sea of human misery

When you're in the middle of a storm, leaving your country just because you have to leave without any reasonable reason, it means you're quitting your country and this is treason.

I lost everything when they put us in prison. I was an enemy alien, a man without a country.

When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.

No one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists.

But I am Armenian and I understand what it is to lose a country and lose a family and have massacres and genocides and everything against my people.

I'm an exile. My father had the courage to leave with his wife, his mother and three children under twelve. It took more courage to leave, to sacrifice everything for freedom, than to stay.

Both my parents came with their parents during the revolution in Cuba. Both my parents were born in Cuba. They left everything over there. My family got stripped of everything - of their land, of their jobs, everything.

Oppressed strangers in our land…

For one moment, after I left Jerusalem with my family for life in Illinois, I thought that maybe there's still a chance: maybe there are still enough people in Israel who refuse to rule and oppress another nation.

I left Cambodia when I was 12 or 13. I didn't really escape, but I needed to go away.

I left Cuba when I was two years old. They took away my country, they stole the most intimate thing a human being can have. How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?

Putin regards me as the most dangerous person, and when they were releasing me from jail, the only condition was that I leave the country. And when they did push me out of the country, to make sure that I wouldn't come back, they opened up a criminal case against me - a new one.

When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground, and transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit. And if it does, the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place. This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree.

Refugee today means somebody who has no home. No homeland. No security. No government to protect him or her. And it is of course one feels not only uprooted, one feels useless. One feels always surrounded by hostile forces. Arousing suspicion.

I only ask of the Government to be treated as all other men are treated. If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in a country where my people will not die so fast.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, . . . neither persons nor property will be safe.

Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.

A calculated, malignant, devastating evil has arisen in our world, ... Civilization cannot ignore the wrongs that have been done. America will not tolerate their being repeated. Justice has a new mission, a new calling against an old evil.

Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.

Such is the moral construction of the world that no national crime passes unpunished in the long run... Were present oppressors to reflect on the same truth, they would spare to their own countries the penalties on their present wrongs which will be inflicted on them in future times. The seeds of hatred and revenge which they sow with a large hand will not fail to produce their fruits in time. Like their brother robbers on the highway, they suppose the escape of the moment a final escape and deem infamy and future risk countervailed by present gain.

Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.

The country in which I live is not my native country, that lies elsewhere, and it must always be the center of my longings.