Genocidal Quotes & Sayings

There have been many genocidal attempts, without and within, to destroy and/or misrepresent the histories, futures, languages, and traditional thoughts of Native peoples. But traditions, unlike doctrines, can persist and evolve at the same time. This anthology is a response to modern-day Native people becoming more and more disgruntled with spurious representations. Each writer has built a bridge between what has been "presented wrongly" and what needs to be "expressed accurately. — MariJo Moore

Well, he's not going to get any nicer. He's a genocidal racist maniac. He's one of these people who thinks the world was a great place when Voldemort ruled the world. He's particularly offended by mixed-blood Mudbloods, the product of wizards and humans. So I hope he goes into therapy. — Jason Isaacs

I am enormously proud to be an American. I would say that the things that our corporate-controlled government has done at best are shameful and at worst genocidal-but there's an incredible and a permanent culture of resistance in this country that I'm very proud to be a part of. It's not the tradition of slave-owningfounding fathers, it's the tradition of the Frederick Douglasses, the Underground Railroads, the Chief Josephs, the Joe Hills, and the Huey P. Newtons. There's so much to be proud of when you're American that's hidden from you. The incredible courage and bravery of the union organizers in the late 1800's and early 1900's-that's amazing. People of get tricked into going overseas and fighting Uncle Sam's Wall Street wars, but these are people who knew what they were fighting for here at home. I think that that's so much more courageous and brave. — Tom Morello

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable. — Michael Ignatieff

black studies illuminates the essential role that racializing assemblages play in the construction of modern selfhood, works toward the abolition of Man, and advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be human. In doing so, black studies pursues a politics of global liberation beyond the genocidal shackles of Man.3 — Alexander G. Weheliye

You can only do so much damage to the biosphere with a bow and arrow. An atomic bomb is something else. The same ignorance backed by industry is capable of killing the entire world. So we have to separate those two issues - the ignorance and the means of inflicting that ignorance - because with modernity and science we have, for the first time in history, a way to overcome our ignorance, at precisely the same time that we have created the means to make this ignorance absolutely genocidal on a global scale. — Ken Wilber

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad ... To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone. — Sam Harris

Israel is the number one rogue state threat to Middle Eastern peace with its nuclear arms and acts of outright aggression towards its peaceful neighbours Syria and Lebanon - and genocidal actions against the marginalised Palestinians of the West Bank - and Gaza in particular. — Mohamed ElBaradei

Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren't planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government's genocidal war against Black and Third World people. — Assata Shakur

The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush, — Hugo Chavez

It's the Muslims who are dragging the rest of the world with them, in their genocidal dreams of annihilating goodness, creativity, production, inventiveness, benevolence, charity, medicine, technology, and all of the gifts of the Jews. Our goodness makes them ill. — Pamela Geller

That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if "hasn't yet committed genocidal slaughter" is a low bar to hop, other communities haven't even managed that much. You'll give credit where it's due. It — N.K. Jemisin

You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible - not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide - I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert - not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide - you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive - that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful. — Noam Chomsky

It's both a tremendous obligation and honor to undertake the unfulfilled work of the best of our abolitionist precursors--those who did not only want the abolition of white supremacist slavery and normalized anti-Black violence, but who also recognized that the greatest promise of abolitionism was a comprehensive transformation of a civilization in which the sanctity of white civil society was defined by its capacity to define 'community' and 'safety' through the effective of its ability to wage racial genocides. The present day work of (..) abolition has to proceed with organic recognition of its historical roots in liberation struggles against slavery, colonization, and conquest--and therefore struggle to constantly develop effective, creative, and politically educating forms of radical movement against the genocidal white supremacist state and the society to which it's tethered. — Dylan Rodriguez

But ... the days that the Jewish people remain passive in the face of genocidal enemies - those days are over. — Benjamin Netanyahu

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway. — Jared Diamond

We consider the Holocaust as being a sort of strange event taking place on another planet; we never understood in a visceral way that this is something that took place in the heart of man. That's something that you can feel, the genocidal tendency is within human nature. It seems that if we forget about this, our future is also compromised. — Laszlo Nemes

Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations will die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls, and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. — Margaret Atwood

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week. — Bert Holldobler

Given the genocidal belligerence of Iranian threats against Israel, it is hard to take issue with Israel's right to preemptive self-defense. — Conrad Black

God's decision to flood the entire earth and kill everybody and everything is without a doubt far and away the greatest single act of genocide in the history of the world. It makes you wonder what God thought of the pathetic attempts of Hitler, Stalin and Mao to compete in the genocidal sweepstakes. They may have slaughtered millions, but there were still plenty of people left when they were done. — Joe Wenke

Those who find ecstasy do so not by visiting the shrines of civilization but by trudging in the swamps of human destitution and misery. Our literature of ecstasy recounts the dark nights of the soul and encounters with mystics in the slums and in the refugee camps of genocidal wars. — Alphonso Lingis

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere.
The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust — Raul Hilberg

It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true. — Christopher Hitchens

(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda
Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed. — Jared Diamond

When we look at these types of things it echoes to lessons we haven't learned from the past. We still don't see Rome as a negative thing; we glorify the Roman Empire. It was a fascist state under the control of an incredibly authoritarian militant pre-emptive striking genocidal regime. — Immortal Technique

Democrats are liberals, and - to their profound embarrassment - liberalism is an old, white European male political philosophy. Liberalism is based on the thought of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and - oh, the shame of it - slave-owning, woman-exploiting Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism is deeply confusing to liberals. America's first great liberal populist was Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of the genocidal Trail of Tears and annihilator of the Second Bank of the United States and hence of centralized economic control. (Sadly, Jackson put an end to the Second Bank of the United States before Hillary Clinton had a chance to claim large lecture fees for speaking to its executives.) Plus, liberalism is painfully unhip. Say "Great Society" to today's with-it young Democratic voters and they hear air quotes around the "Great." LBJ — P. J. O'Rourke

At the time, Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal policies, and racist exploitation. — Assata Shakur

The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal. — Frederick Forsyth

The dinosaurs had all died, too, along with their dinosaur dreams. A world capable of such genocidal indifference didn't deserve its own existence. Walt wanted to watch it wither, to crumble into shit and dirt, fertilizer for a future that would one day crumble itself. — Edward W. Robertson

Part of what we want to do with the Heroic Imagination Project is to get kids to think about what it means to be a hero. The most basic concept of a hero is socially constructed: It differs from culture to culture and changes over time. Think of Christopher Columbus. Until recently, he was a hero. Now he's a genocidal murderer! If he were alive today, he'd say, What happened? I used to be a hero, and now people are throwing tomatoes at me! — Philip Zimbardo

In his important work on the subject, Stephen Sizer has revealed how Christian Zionists have constructed a historical narrative that describes the Muslim attitude to Christianity throughout the ages as a kind of a genocidal campaign, first against the Jews and then against the Christians.12 Hence, what were once hailed as moments of human triumph in the Middle East - the Islamic renaissance of the Middle Ages, the golden era of the Ottomans, the emergence of Arab independence and the end of European colonialism - were recast as the satanic, anti-Christian acts of heathens. In the new historical view, the United States became St. George, Israel his shield and spear, and Islam their dragon. — Noam Chomsky

There are genocidal tendencies that are at the heart of the human potential, and I think if we don't talk about it, we're not preparing ourselves for a better future. — Laszlo Nemes

Yet, as should become obvious, genocidal events have been common enough to suggest that they cannot be explained as some kind of deviant behavior. On the contrary, given the right circumstances, normal human beings are all too ready to kill by category. — Daniel Chirot

It appears that there is a genocidal plan against Black people. — Louis Farrakhan

Only recently has tolerance become an emblem of Western civilization, an emblem that identifies the West exclusively with modernity, and with liberal democracy in particular, while also disavowing the West's
savagely intolerant history, which includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch burnings, centuries of anti-Semitism, slavery, lynching, genocidal and other violent practices of imperialism and colonialism, Naziism, and brutal responses to decolonization. — Wendy Brown

Sad to say, in a present-day world that seems to be governed by clashing self
interests and material forces, where we have learned that idealistic rhetoric usually cloaks nationalistic purposes or even far more diabolical schemes, it has become increasingly difficult to explain collective actions that profess to be driven by virtuous ideals or a desire to make the world a better place. During the past century, various national leaders have ordered the slaughter of tens of millions of people as the supposedly necessary means to perfect the world. Today we are far more cynical, I fear, than the generations at the beginning of the past genocidal century, before the First World War and the Russian Revolution. — David Brion Davis

Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct
if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along. — Michael Parenti

The drops (polio vaccine) were designed,said these believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back ... — Christopher Hitchens

It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER. — A.E. Samaan

People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to provide mink coats and diamonds for chattering, trivial, pale matrons, or genocidal opportunities for their unsexed, unloved, and, finally, despicable men - oh, pioneers!

There will be bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and the white man's sun has set. Period. — James Baldwin

The genocide (in Rwanda) was a collective act. What made it possible, what made that final political crime possible, was the absence, the erasure, of seeing the other. Of knowing, of feeling, of being with the other. And when that's removed, then politics
can become genocidal. — James Orbinski

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead. — Martin Amis

The genocidal culture's image of woman as object and victim is paralleled by contemporary representations that continually show the Earth as a toy, machine, or violated object, as well as by the religious and scientific ideology that legitimates the possession, contamination, and destruction of Mother Earth. — Jane Caputi

The imperial, genocidal war machine never rests, so I don't either. — Lydia Lunch

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history. — Noam Chomsky

I don't believe in, and I am a devout non-believer, in playing new songs live if the subjected and pathetic crowd has not heard them before because I consider it like mass psychosis and genocidal. — Peter Steele

Under natural conditions, a typical chimpanzee troop consists of about twenty to fifty individuals. As the number of chimpanzees in a troop increases, the social order destabilises, eventually leading to a rupture and the formation of a new troop by some of the animals. Only in a handful of cases have zoologists observed groups larger than a hundred. Separate groups seldom cooperate, and tend to compete for territory and food. Researchers have documented prolonged warfare between groups, and even one case of 'genocidal' activity in which one troop systematically slaughtered most members of a neighbouring band. — Yuval Noah Harari

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. — Richard Dawkins

The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. — Noam Chomsky

...many of us know deep down, whether we choose to admit it or not, a number of simple truths: the global capitalist economy is incompatible with life. As numerous environmentalist authors... have noted, the global economy effectively creates infinite demand and no natural community can support infinite demand, especially when nothing beneficial is given back. A global economy is extractive, it gives nothing back, but follows the ecocidal pattern of a genocidal machine converting raw materials into power at the expense of living things and living systems. — Damien Short

This anthology is a testament to American Indian consciousness continuing to circulate, regardless of past or present genocidal attempts, whether cerebral, endemic, systematic, or otherwise. — MariJo Moore

U.S. government infrastructure. I am concerned about the growing number of Americans who have been recruited to Islam. They are usually angry young men with a sense of hopelessness. Even if they are not suicidal, they may very well be genocidal as well as eager to seek revenge for what they see as injustice. — Joel C. Rosenberg

As a Jew I cannot sit idle while genocidal atrocities continue to unfold in Darfur, Sudan. — Jan Schakowsky

"Faith is what's wrong with the world, Aidan. Or don't you follow the news?"
"That's not faith," he says. "That's the complete lack of it. If any one of those mass-genocidal idiots had faith, they wouldn't have the insane need to prove it to others." — Cyma Rizwaan Khan

The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised, many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the existence of African "civilizations." Mainly, this stems from a desire to make comparisons with European "civilizations." This is not the context in which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word "civilization" to describe Western Europe and North America. — Walter Rodney

President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a genocidal weight of whiteness. — George Gilder

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can - and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly - and no doubt will keep trying. — Robert A. Heinlein

If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the effects of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions. — John Howard Griffin