Genocide Awareness Quotes

If I'd been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?

I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

Holocaust? Ninety million Indians? Only four million left? They all have casinos - what's to complain about?

Armenians, as a people that have survived the Genocide, have a moral duty towards mankind and history in the prevention of genocides. We have done and will continue to do our best to support the persistent implementation of the Genocide Convention. Genocide cannot concern only one people, because it is a crime against humanity.

As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.

During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn't know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it.

I can tell you a graphic difference. In Prague, for example, big red posters were put up on which could be read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself: If I put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper for such posters.

This was a tragic event in human history, but by paying tribute to the Armenian community we ensure the lessons of the Armenian genocide are properly understood and acknowledged.

There was a genocide unfolding against Bosnian Muslims and we, in the United Kingdom, were incredibly angered - a teenager at the time, 15 years old, so my young teenage mind processed that in a way typical to the very passionate and angry and black-and-white way that teenagers often can do.

As the generation of Holocaust survivors and liberators dwindles, the torch of remembrance, of bearing witness, and of education must continue forward.

Zakhor. Al Tichkah. Remember. Never forget.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

Do books about the Holocaust make us think, "Oh well, there was nothing we could've done to prevent that or prevent it from happening again"? Of course not. It makes us angry and determined to stop such atrocities.

We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.

We do a lot of shows for young people who have probably never been to the theater before and they are learning about the Holocaust, which unhappily, many of them do not know about.

I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?

The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books.

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.

One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?

Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it ... the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.

I think the only value of 'Hotel Rwanda' is the fact that it keeps the Rwandan genocide alive, but as far as content, it's Hollywood.

The American and the British armies liberated camps, there wasn't a single order of the day: Let's go and liberate the camp. They stumbled upon the camps. Same thing with the Russians, I asked the Colonel who liberated Auschwitz, they didn't, there wasn't a priority. But I feel that that was a mistake, it was a sin because they could have saved so many people and they didn't.