Atrocities quotes
96 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."
"Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity"
"Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities."
"I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity."
"Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside atrocities — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence."
"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state... It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."
"Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human."
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
"Honduras has become a murder capital of the world; there's horrible atrocities, infanticide, murder of women is way up, and people are fleeing in desperation. They come to the border, and we put them in trucks and send them back to Mexico to die. And here people are scared of illegal immigrants - that's what we're doing. It's pretty shocking."
"3,000 of my neighbors were murdered. My country was, utterly unprovoked, savagely attacked. I wish all those responsible for the atrocity of 9/11 to burn in Hell."
"As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities."
"The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system."
"Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both countries [Pakistan and India]. It's also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces."
"It is necessary for me to express the deep sorrow that I feel for all the Cuban people both inside and outside of Cuba that have suffered the atrocities and repression caused by Fidel Castro and his totalitarian regime."
"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."
"In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on."
"He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."
"I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets."
"The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content, or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result."
"Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity."
"mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow."
"Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians."
"In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis."
"A truly nonviolent man would never live to tell the tale of atrocities. He would have laid down his life on the spot in non-violent resistance."
