Human Displacement Quotes

The twenty-first century will be characterized by the mass movement of people being pushed and pulled within and beyond their borders by conflict, calamity, or opportunity.

For years, we have underestimated the challenges of mass immigration.

When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand, I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

So, you wrecked Alcatraz Island, made Mount St. Helens explode, and displaced half a million people, but at least you're safe." "Yep, that pretty much covers it.

Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.

Almost every continent in the world, including our own, has refugees. But how often when we hear the word do we pause to remind ourselves what being a refugee means?

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.

Men can get jobs from one country to another, they can get in. But the people who always fell through the cracks were women and children, especially when you are displaced. I've always said, 'I am the face of a refugee.'

Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.

We're so lucky where we live, but we're so out of touch. Everyone's mindset is made to feel that refugees are a problem, but it's more than that. They're human beings, too. They were forced from their homes.

Today three-quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced: there are 5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the world.

The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies - drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

Tools can rule men sooner than they expect; the plow makes man the lord of the garden but also the refugee from the dust bowl.

For over ten years, bombs rained down on every village and hamlet in South Vietnam, and no one budged. It took the coming of a Communist 'peace' to send hundreds of thousands of people out into the South China Sea, on anything that could float, or might float, to risk dehydration, piracy, drowning . . .

Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.

Can you really send back people to where they are fleeing from?

Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it.

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

We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Although the history of dispossession and exile for Jews is very different from the history of dispossession and exile for Palestinians, they both have recent and searing experiences which might allow them to come to a common understanding on the rights of refugees, or what it might mean to live together with resonant histories of that kind.