Atrocities Quotes - Page 10

• [Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

  William Thomas Beckford

  Fiction, Half, Literature

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• If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings.... What I am condemning is that one power, with a president [George W. Bush] who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.

  Nelson Mandela

  Country, Thinking, America

  "Mandela: U.S. wants holocaust", www.cnn.com. January 30, 2003.

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• The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, "We got there first!" It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them.

  Karl Kraus

  Lying, Hero, People

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• I investigated reported Japanese atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts of reliable eyewitnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility is beyond question afford convincing proof that the Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns. Not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians were slaughtered, many in cold blood.

  Koki Hirota

  Fashion, Army, Blood

  "Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing". Book by Robert Sabella, p. 56, 2002.

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• This country needs room to grow and expand. In all my own newspapers I read frightful tales of the shameful atrocities being perpetrated on our Democratic minorities in Maine and Vermont. My patience is almost at an end, and if provoked much further I will place both countries under American protection, even if I have to send in my tourists to start trouble so I'll have to send in a force to restore order.

  Gracie Allen

  Country, Order, Maine

  "How to Become President". Book by Gracie Allen, 1940.

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• None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.

  Hannah

  Past, Understanding, Different

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• If everyone is a hero, then disasters and atrocities lose their meaning. It's only when certain people are heroes and others are not that these tragedies and disasters that mankind faces take on meaning.

  Gao Xingjian

  Hero, People, Tragedy

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• Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correcta nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion andurgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protectits religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish HolyLand of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades maderight.

  Scott Anderson

  Christian, Religious, War

  Scott Anderson (2014). “Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, p.234, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians.

  Conrad Black

  Christian, World, Persecution

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• The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

  Susan Sontag

  Firsts, Surprise, Shock

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.21, Macmillan

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• If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home.

  Derrick Jensen

  Home, Waiting, Wish

  Derrick Jensen (2004). “A Language Older Than Words”, p.375, Chelsea Green Publishing

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• Colonial atrocities have prepared the soil; it is for socialists to sow the seeds of revolution.

  Ho Chi Minh

  Soil, Revolution, Prepared

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• [The Bytyqi Brothers were] American citizens and we have been seeking answers to why no one's been held accountable for these atrocities. [Family members] expect our government to do everything we can.

  Ben Cardin

  Brother, Government, Citizens

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• In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.

  Erich Fromm

  Baby, Real, War

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.56, Open Road Media

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• Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.

  Learned Hand

  Black, Liberty, World

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.

  Marie Colvin

  War, Home, Differences

  "Marie Colvin: 'Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice'" by Marie Colvin, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2012.

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• I don't know how to stop the atrocities. I don't know how to make people care. But looking into my sister's eyes, we seem to have carved out something between us that none of the madness can touch. Invisible threads.

  Lisa Shannon

  Eye, People, Care

  Lisa Shannon (2010). “A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman”, p.315, Seal Press

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• The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.

  Charles Bukowski

  Giving, Mad, Alternatives

  Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

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• The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

  Sam Harris

  Men, Media, Perfect

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.67, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, Issues, Abuse

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• Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Animal, Vegetarianism, Abuse

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