Humanitarian Crises Quotes

Through both our admissions policies and, equally importantly, through our support for international protection and assistance, the United States leads the world in responding to refugee and related humanitarian crises.

There have been poverty, pestilence, and famine, which were due to man's inadequate mastery of nature. There have been wars, oppressions and tortures which have been due to men's hostility to their fellow men.

When America doesn't act, bad things happen

The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

Members of Congress goes before the cameras telling us that the immigration situation is a humanitarian crises, and then they leave town [having a Congressional vacation]. In a crisis I do my job. They should be here in Washington doing their jobs.

The past year's natural disasters have highlighted the invaluable contributions of volunteers in our communities. They have volunteered their time, energy and skills to save lives and to rebuild communities. In this they joined countless people around the world who volunteer every day in response to 'silent crises'. These often unsung heroes understand all too well that poverty, disease and famine are just as deadly and destructive as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis.

Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.

I will be asking my network to lead a discussion on the issues of class, race, energy, the environment, disaster planning, Iraq -- all those things and more. This encompasses so many of the major issues of our time.

Through the example of our own policies as well as leadership in international fora, the United States should work towards adoption of more effective policies to avert, respond to, and resolve refugee and related humanitarian crises.

The principal cause of suffering during humanitarian crises is insufficient respect of applicable rules of international humanitarian law.

Humanitarian assistance, once conceived as a short-term relief effort, is increasingly the only substitute for long-term development work in protracted armed conflicts.

The world should have stopped, but it didn't. The world kept on going. How can the world just keep on going? An earthquake in India kills a thousand people, and the world keeps on going. A famine in China kills a million people, and the world keeps on going. The twin towers of the World Trade Center buckle and fall, and the world, the world keeps on going.

What armies and how much of war I have seen, what thousands of marching troops, what fields of slain, what prisons, what hospitals, what ruins, what cities in ashes, what hunger and nakedness, what orphanages, what widowhood, what wrongs and what vengeance.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

Other countries have far greater problems than we have.

That's part of what I touch on in my [UN] speech - when assaults happen on women and girls in these fragile countries, in these places of crisis, there isn't the psychosocial support. There aren't counseling services. It's not in a lot of cultures to explicitly talk about things that maybe have happened to the body. So, repression of emotion, and shame, and guilt is something that really needs to be handled in humanitarian crises.

I would say the world's in terrible shape, but I'm afraid the world would say, "Look who's talking".

For centuries, our country has welcomed people fleeing religious persecution, war and humanitarian crises to create a better future for themselves and their futures. With proper safeguards in place, we should offer refuge to some migrants with legitimate fears of persecution and violence.

Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.

In my 20 years as a photographer, covering conflicts from Bosnia to Gaza to Iraq to Afghanistan, injured civilians and soldiers have passed through my life many times.

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

Should we always wait for human tragedies to happen on the African continent in order to attract attention from America?

You have to first handle the humanitarian crises and troops are very useful for doing that.

There are issues of war and peace. And then, there are issues of life and death like this one that are no less morally compelling than war itself.

We as politicians have to understand that the greatest threats to our security are no longer conventional military ones. You cannot nuke a famine.