Quotes About Atrocity

recent response to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda: while thousands have died almost unbelievably cruel deaths, the entire world has watched CNN and wrung its hands.

And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking; Dachau. —WILLIAM C. KIRBY, Professor of Modern Chinese History and Chairman of the Department of History

There is one class to whom reflection is a fault; is not only a fault, is a sin; is not only a sin, is an atrocity - who cannot bear to exist without their own existence dis-existencing somebody else's existence.

les maux atroces que les hommes ont imaginés pour oublier l'immense ennui qui les ronge ne sont que des jeux d'enfants.

One thing Gamache knew for sure. Little Frederick Lawson had not picked up his stick, pointed it, and slaughtered a village filled with old men, and women and children. So how did one become the other? How did a nine-year-old boy acting out heroics become a twenty-year-old man committing an atrocity?

You would think bearing witness to something like this would make a difference, and yet this isn't so. In the newspapers I have read about history repeating itself in Cambodia. Rwanda. Sudan.

Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.

What Himmler planned as a gift-wrapped massacre became a siege lasting nearly a month, until at last the Germans decided to torch everything—buildings, bunkers, sewers, and all the people in them.

The Nazi goal of more living space (Lebensraum) applied pointedly to Poland, where Hitler had ordered his troops to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the Lebensraum

Jackson's men cut off the noses of dead Indians as they counted the bodies. Afterwards there were few regrets; one of Jackson's soldiers chuckled that he had killed a boy "five or six years of age" for the reason that "he would have become an Indian someday."22

Under a program called T4, the Nazis between 1939 and 1941 rounded up 200,000 Germans who had been diagnosed as insane or incurably ill. Those people were then euthanized in gas chambers.8

In reference to four of the most notorious death camps, Snyder notes, "The 1.6 million or so Jews killed at Treblinka, Chelmni, Belzec and Sobibor were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide." At Auschwitz, the Nazis used Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas to kill an additional one million Jews.

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

Nick Makoha's Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press) is a bold and brilliant poetry debut that does not avert its gaze from trauma and atrocity (exploring along the way the brutal rule of Idi Amin and the civil war) and yet is light on its feet and fills you with hope. The Guardian

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the one who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator. Vsevolod Meyerhold came as close as anyone to achieving this. It is important to know of the full horror of his sacrifice. It is easy for all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the ones who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator ... It is easy for us all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.

On June 26, a thousand Jews were beaten to death in a garage. The SS arranged for locals to perform the massacre. They thought it might look distasteful if they carried it out themselves.

In April 1945, immediately before surrendering the construction site, the Germans locked 1,046 of the workers into a barn and burned them alive.

Atrocity cannot be its own explanation. Violence cannot be allowed to speak for itself, for violence is not its own meaning. To be made thinkable it needs to be historicized.

Systematic rape is one of the most hideous, and most explicitly male, expressions of warfare, but it is hardly the only one. All wars are extraordinarily costly in material terms and grotesquely painful in human terms. Yet wars are so much a part of the human experience that we don't always pause to realize that one of the most astonishing aspects of war is the very fact that we so regularly go out and deliberately kill members of our own species.

In 1994, eight hundred thousand people were massacred in Rwanda," Fontana said. "Mostly by having an arm hacked off by a machete and being left to die.

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

By noon, Pino was sitting on the steps of La Scala where he could see the front of the Hotel Regina and the Daimler parked nearby. He was numb with grief. Gazing across the street at the statue of the great Leonardo and listening to the chatter of citizens who hurried past, he wanted to cry again. Everyone was talking about the atrocity.