Vivienne Westwood Quotes

I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It's a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.

A refugee in the traditional vision is someone who flees from country to another because of persecution or conflict. But what we're witnessing now more and more is a certain number of mega-trends interacting with one another: population growth, urbanization, food insecurity, water scarcity, climate change, and conflict.

I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.

Our world is facing a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Second World War. This presents us with great challenges and many hard decisions.

Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family.

If there is a spot where you have dictatorship, where people are not free, people are not satisfied, they do not find food and shelter, they are under the poverty level, this is a dangerous spot for the whole world, because those people will move, and they will move to different places. They will be carrying bad feelings towards others.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

Inequality, climate change, and conflict are evicting millions from their homes. But these perils are being met with 'anti-answers' such as nationalism, closed borders, lies, and hatred.

We live in a world where over 160 million people are displaced because of climate change or war, and they have no rights and no protection, and not enough countries or people around the world are helping them.

The drafters of the [Refugee Convention ] had the Cold War in mind and mainly sought to protect a few thousand dissidents from the Communist bloc. They did not envision the mass displacements of people we are seeing today.

We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

Increasingly gang violence and organized crime, together with climate change-driven natural disasters, are displacing more people as wars are fewer on the continent and political violence has decreased considerably, the NRC has decided to treat this as a humanitarian crisis.

The migrants are not a temporary crisis. The crisis is mounting.

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].

We now know that climate change is a driver of migration, and is expected to increase the displacement of populations.

...in the midst of migrants in search of a better life there are people in need of protection: refugees and asylum-seekers, women and children victims of trafficking...Many move simply to avoid dying of hunger. When leaving is not an option but a necessity, this is more than poverty.

I simply don't understand the refugee crisis. The history of humanity can be told through a story of migration and settlement. If I can't protect my family, I'm coming to where you are; I'm just coming. It's a round world, and we've all got to get on with it and move on.

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."

There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.

It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.

We suffer with those who have disappeared, those who have had to flee their homes, and those who have been tortured.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

If there are more and more environmental refugees, they are going to end up on your doorstep too.

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...