M.I.A. Quotes

I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, at the end of the 20th century.

The deplorable Syrian refugee crisis was created because Syrian President Bashar al-Assad started a war on his people, and the international community refused to confront him.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

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.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters.

We brought disaster upon... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave... We have rendered them dispossessed... We have accustomed them to begging... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon... men, women and children - all this in service of political purposes...

Syria has become the great tragedy of the century—a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history.

Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.

Nothing seemed more important to me than to make the world aware of the senseless death and starvation in South Sudan. I wanted people to see through the eyes of the suffering so my photos might motivate the international community to act.

It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us.

I'm not a war photographer. I've always dealt with the consequences of conflict.

People feel repressed by their own governments; they feel unfairly treated by the outside world; they wake up in the morning, and who do they see - they see people being shot and killed: all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.

The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who 'disappeared'. That's what the candle is for.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

We must do all we can to help improve the deplorable human rights situation of the North Korean people.

I wish we didn't have to own up to a policy deliberately designed to inflict suffering on people who have already been traumatised in the countries from which they've fled.

One day I am at home, watching dramatic images of Iraqi Yazidis fleeing for their lives being aired nonstop on 24-hour news channels. Days later, I am there, staring at tens of thousands of displaced Iraqis and feeling a 35-millimeter frame cannot capture the scope of devastation and heartbreak before me.

Hamas, they are using civilians' lives, they are using children, they are using the suffering of people every day to achieve their goals. And this is what I hate.

The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.

Since the early '80s, I've found myself in war zones in various parts of the world.

Twelve hundred people died last week in Darfur. Their lives are just as important is yours and mine. The Foley story is a big story but in the interest of pursuing a sex scandal we are ignoring life and death problems all over the planet.

A factor was the call by the Arab governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and leave for the bordering Arab countries ... We brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees by calling on them and pleading with them to leave their land.

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

I sincerely wish that every member of Congress could visit the displaced person's camp in Germany and Austria and see just what is happening to 500,000 human beings through no fault of their own.