Jean Houston Quotes

Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill a million and you're a conqueror.

I got out of the elevator and confronted Mr. Wexler. “Killing is wrong.” “We kill chickens,” Mr. Wexler said. “We kill cows. We kill trees. So big deal, we kill some drug dealers.” It was hard to argue with that kind of logic because I like cows and chickens and trees much better than drug dealers.

But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it's happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing - In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide.

So let us call genocide, genocide. Let us not minimize the deliberate murder of 1.5 million people. Let us have a moral victory that can shine as a light to all nations.

Genocide

Every crime, even the most atrocious, may be justified.

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.

Genocide is also women’s business. When given the ‘opportunity’, women too will engage in it, even the bloodiest aspects of it.

Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it.

I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a pacifist, so I feel that no atrocity is ever justified. I've become more vigilant about evil. I think I recognize its seeds more quickly. I see its source.

There isn't a definite right and wrong anyway. Sometimes we do what seems wrong, but we have good reasons for doing it, so it's not wrong after all.

We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.

Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?

A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.

I became interested in genocide, because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.

Killing one man is murder. Killing millions is a statistic

Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.

Killing one person makes you a murderer. Killing a million people makes you a king. Killing them all makes you God.

The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with to the very culture that has produced both the greatest liberation from want, ignorance and superstition and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in human history. No one has explained the origin and development of that intellectual pathology adequately. Though it constitutes one of the deepest flaws and and tragedies of our society. It is a pathology that with each passing decade becomes ever coarser, more crude and more detached from any principle of reality. That pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of communism with without a tear, an act of contrition or a reevaluation of self, soul and mind.

No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.