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Quotes About Massacres

Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history's major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers
~ Steven Pinker
Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call "civilization," history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be "blasted out" and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us.
~ Ben Ehrenreich
We live in a time in which violence is right before our very eyes. The word is applied to extremely varied contexts, but each is marked by open violence--by violent acts, fury, hatred, massacres, cruelty, collective atrocities--but also by the cloacked violences of economic domination, of capital-labor relations, of the great North-South divide, to say nothing of all of the "every day" violences perpetrated against the weak: women, children, all those excluded by the social system.
~ Françoise Héritier
The genocide didn't begin on the sixth of April 1994, but in 1959 through little massacres that no-one paid attention to.
~ Boubacar Boris Diop
When I first saw [James Baldwin] on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America's contradictions transformed his face into a warrior's face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.
~ Sonia Sanchez
I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
~ Sylvia Plath
you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades — especially to those who remain a little too Westernized — the solidarity of the metropolitans with their colonial agents. Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed
~ Frantz Fanon
No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
~ Steve Allen
The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.
~ Milan Kundera
Nobby had survived any number of famous massacres by not being there.
~ Terry Pratchett
An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence by the sword (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called one of the decisive battles of the world.
~ Hilaire Belloc
Israel remains a foreign body in this large area, and it always proved that it is unable to coexist with this environment, because the, the scope of the massacres that it has committed does not permit it to coexist.
~ Hassan Nasrallah
I've not lived one single day of peace in Colombia, and 90 percent of people here say the same thing. We have gotten used to living in a war - we don't even react to massacres.
~ Juan Manuel Santos
In the history of battles and wars, the massacres of civilians were the main reason of revolutions success.
~ M.F. Moonzajer
The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed 'exchanges' of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Archbishop of Aleppo's warning: when a multi-ethnic empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage. It was as if, for the sake of a spuriously modern uniformity, the basest instincts of ordinary men were unleashed in a kind of tribal bloodletting.
~ Niall Ferguson
In an important departure from tradition, the commission singled out Turkish massacres and deportations of Armenian civilians as being so grotesque that—although they had not been specifically banned by the Hague and Geneva conventions—these actions were inherently criminal under the most elementary norms of human behavior. This was, they said, a "crime against humanity
~ Christopher Simpson
They were weeping not because a young man was marrying and leaving his mother but because of the incalculable loss and suffering that Armenians have endured, because they couldn't not weep for relatives of theirs who had perished during the massacres of 1915, because no joy in the world could make them forget their nation's grief and their homeland on the other side of Mount Ararat.
~ Vasily Grossman
Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a new way of living—one without massacres and torn throats and bonfires of the fallen, without revenants or bastard armies or children ripped from their mothers' arms to take their turn in the killing and dying. This was not that world.
~ Laini Taylor
Many massacres have happened when people yell "surprise"! Pearl Harbor. The Tet Offensive. My uncle's 50th birthday party. I was there, man! How many more people gotta die?
~ Christopher Titus
Of the approximately nine hundred thousand Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only one hundred thousand remained on or near their lands and homes. Those who remained became the Palestinian minority in Israel. The rest were expelled, or fled under the threat of expulsion, and a few thousand died in massacres.
~ Noam Chomsky
The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen babies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
~ Colson Whitehead
The ongoing hostilities involving the French and their shifting alliances with Italian city-states often resembled pageantry and processionals more than war. "A march through Italy was an occasion for feasts, spectacles, firework displays, jousts, the expropriation of estates, and occasional massacres," wrote Robert Payne. "The French aristocracy acquired new titles, new experiences, new mistresses, new diseases."1
~ Walter Isaacson
even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man--more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.
~ Charles Krauthammer
I gave it up. The man annoyed me. I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie, but I was dashed if I could see why he couldn't do it with a bright and cheerful smile.
~ p g wodehouse