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Quotes About Refugees

Roosevelt knew better than to suggest that Chamberlain criticize or call into question "the present German policy of racial persecution." All he asked was that he try to negotiate an agreement that would permit Jewish refugees who wanted to leave Germany "to take with them a reasonable percentage of their property. 
~ David Nasaw
The motivating force behind the UNDHR and the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees was a desire to ensure that never again would there be such suffering as that experienced in the wake of the Second World War. Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening now.
~ Dawn Chatty
Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands—or will we imprison them?
~ Jeff Goodell
Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today's Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.
~ Jeff Goodell
We'd been fighting and crying, and we were weary in that way that only a couple whose marriage is collapsing can be weary. We had the eyes of refugees.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
In both Europe and the USA, racialization is fed by a backlash against 'multiculturalism' in which the positions of the extreme and the mainstream right often overlap to a considerable extent, assisted by a common over-reaction over issues of refugees and asylum seekers.
~ Ali Rattansi
Yes, but everywhere needs some defence against people just coming in and overrunning the place with their terrorisms or their deficiencies, eh, sweetheart, Richard says. That's right, Terence says. Got to keep all those bad refugees out. The ones looking for a better life. Couldn
~ Ali Smith
I request permission to issue visas to hundreds of Jewish people who have come to the consulate here in Kaunas seeking transit visas. They are suffering extremely. As a fellow human being, I cannot refuse their requests. Please permit me to issue visas to them. This request is a humanitarian plea. The refugees' request for visas should not be denied.
~ Alison Leslie Gold
Dès que j'ai atteint mon indépendance, un logement habité par moi a d'emblée ressemblé à un débarras squatté par des réfugiés politiques, prêts à déguerpir à la moindre descente de police.
~ Amelie Nothomb
If they wanted to end the violence and war between them and if they wanted Jews and Palestinians to live in peace, Jews and Palestinians, then they should consider this solution: one democratic state, free from weapons of mass destruction, and with the return of the Palestinian refugees.
~ Muammar al-Gaddafi
Our immigration policy should be based in compassion and a desire to help the other.
~ Ilhan Omar
I disagree with any policy that would turn America's back on people who are fleeing harm. I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for.
~ Kamala Harris
We're looking to ways to build in the responsibility we have on climate change and the way that we approach, potentially, climate change refuges in the future amongst our neighbors.
~ Jacinda Ardern
I never take for granted how lucky I am to be an American and what a privilege it is to spend each day at a nonprofit dedicated to helping the next generation of girls achieve their dreams. My journey, as the daughter of refugees, shows what refugees and the children of refugees can create for all Americans.
~ Reshma Saujani
The asylum process is being completely taken advantage of.
~ Dan Crenshaw
Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations fail to convey the passivity and abnegation that the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight.
~ Richard Lloyd Parry
To him, refugees were people at the end of the chain of events that had begun with decisions made by those at the top and the beginning of the chain.
~ Robert D Kaplan
The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees
~ Robert D. Kaplan
those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies.
~ Robert D. Kaplan
I want to scream again, and I remember that last time I felt this way, riding with Baba in the tank of the fuel truck, buried in the dark with other refugees. I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my leg blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other reality tonight.
~ Khaled Hosseini
At the height of the exodus, as many as eight million Afghans were living abroad as refugees. Today, more than two million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan.
~ Khaled Hosseini
The hallway's walls are covered now with posters, of dinosaurs, cartoon characters, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and displays of artwork by the orphans. Many of the drawings depict tanks running over huts, men brandishing AK-47s, refugee camp tents, scenes of jihad.
~ Khaled Hosseini
I Nya Testamentet finns till exempel liknelsen om den barmhärtige samariern. ... Hur kan vi tillämpa den principen i våra stressiga liv på 2000-talet? Innebär det att var och en av oss borde ta hand om en familj med syriska flyktingar?
~ Kwame Anthony Appiah
if five hundred million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chance does humanity have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that beset our global civilization?
~ Yuval Noah Harari