Simon Bolivar Quotes

When I was 10 years old, I fled my homeland amid the bomb blasts of civil war in Sudan.

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

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.

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

Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or "the people," constitute the great majority of those affected.

Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of [Syrian] depravity sinks lower.

When I was a girl, civil war in Sudan forced me to flee my home town of Wau.

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.

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.

We've got a very difficult situation created by this embrace of the so-called Arab Spring. And that's not getting better. It's getting worse. The carnage for the people of Syria is horrific, and it's quite frankly too little, too late to reverse a lot of that.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

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.

16,000,000 Americans either defend their rights or suffer repression at the hands of Spain, which, although once the world's greatest empire, is now too weak, with what little is left her, to rule the new hemisphere or even to maintain herself in the old. And shall Europe, the civilized, the merchant, the lover of liberty allow an aged serpent, bent only on satisfying its venomous rage, devour the fairest part of our globe? What! Is Europe deaf to the clamor of her own interests? Has she no eyes to see justice?

It is essential that a government mold itself … to the nature of the circumstances, the times, and the men that comprise it. If these factors are prosperity and peace, the government should be mild and protecting; but if they are turbulence and disaster, it should be stern and arm itself with a firmness that matches its dangers, without regard for laws or constitutions until happiness and peace have been reestablished.

How beautiful it would be if the Isthmus of Panama should come to be to us what the Isthmus of Corinth was to the Greeks! May God grant that some day we may have the happiness of installing there an august congress of the representatives of the republics, kingdoms and empires, to discuss and study the high interests of peace and war with nations of other three parts of the world!

Syria cannot continue this way—killing their people

Failed states have become breeding grounds for conflict.

Syria: It’s a messy civil war and we should not be involved in it.

During the post-Soviet anarchy and the rush for the spoils of war, Hekmatyar spent most of his time between 1992 and 1996 raining rockets and artillery shells on the people of Kabul, leaving the city a smoking tomb of as many as 50,000 corpses.

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital in the North, to safety.

The Sudanese army has retaken some towns. The people there are all living in caves because the Sudanese army is shelling their villages.

It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II].

One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.

Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.