Elliott Abrams Quotes

I'm not a politician. I'm not a hero. I'm a messenger. It's very important that we study genocide because it has happened again and again. We made a mistake because we didn't believe Cambodians would kill Cambodians. We didn't believe that one human being would kill another human being. That's why we allowed them to kill us. I want you to know that genocide can happen anywhere on this planet. Together we can prevent genocide from happening again.

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

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point.

Effective intervention ended Sierra Leone’s civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to 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.

If the president of the United States says that attacks on civilians, starvation, and denial of religious freedom in Sudan are important international issues, they become so.

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

National sovereignty is never an excuse for slaughtering your own people

We tend to think of World War II and all the atrocities that happened, and people say, 'Never again.' But these things are still happening. The Amnesty International files are big.

It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the 'international community' had learned nothing since the Holocaust.

We cannot guarantee that a humanitarian catastrophe of the extent of the Holocaust will not happen again. On the contrary, we witness a catalogue of atrocities every day in wars across the globe.

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

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

Our campaign is powered by college students who are not about to let the first genocide of the 21st century happen on their watch.

When human rights are systematically abused, it raises the question whether it may be legitimate in some circumstances for the international community to intervene within individual states as well as in conflicts between states.

As a Jew I cannot sit idle while genocidal atrocities continue to unfold in Darfur, Sudan.

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.

In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don't know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars.

If there's a clear genocide somewhere, don't we really want to positively impact that kind of a situation? Isn't that what we're all about? Isn't that what we've always been about?

The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century.

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

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

The serious crimes by the Sudanese government and the government-supported militias must be met with serious consequences. We must work for tough international economic sanctions on the Sudanese government.

The biggest road block to action on genocide and other human rights crimes is ignorance. Most people just don't know that such things are happening, and often, if they have a vague idea they are happening, there is a feeling that there is nothing that can be done to stop these crimes.

Countries can’t stand by as a genocide takes place in another country.