Concentration Camp Quotes - Page 4

• I would not draw definitive conclusions from that. If we look at South and North Korea, it is pretty hard to believe that we're dealing with the same people. Half of the people are forced to live in a concentration camp; the other have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world.

  Garry Kasparov

  Believe, Korea, People

  Source: www.rferl.org

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• The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.

  Robert Capa

  Devil, Care, Photographer

  Robert Capa (2015). “Slightly Out Of Focus”, p.245, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.

  Tom Lehrer

  Fun, Stupid, Thinking

  "Stop clapping, this is serious". Sydney Morning Herald Interview, www.smh.com.au. March 1, 2003.

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• Many genetically "altered" fish escape from the confines of the crowded floating concentration camps to mingle and mate with their wild fish cousins, causing horrible and irreversible damage to wild species.

  Sharon Gannon

  Cousin, Floating, Damage

  "Sharon Gannon on Veganism". jivamuktiyoga.com. November 16, 2016.

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• There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

  Hannah Arendt

  Confusion, Holocaust, Essentials

  Hannah Arendt (1951). “The Burden of Our Time”

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• Once the concentration camps and the hell-holes of the world were in darkness. Now they are lit by the light of the Amnesty candle; the candle in barbed wire. When I first lit the Amnesty candle, I had in mind the old Chinese proverb: 'Better light a candle than curse the darkness.'

  Peter Benenson

  Light, Darkness, Chinese

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• Some European countries insist on saying that during World War II, Hitler burned millions of Jews and put them in concentration camps. Any historian, commentator or scientist who doubts that is taken to prison or gets condemned. Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true... If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe - like in Germany, Austria or other countries - to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

  Country, War, Taken

  "Iran Prez: Move Israel To Europe". www.cbsnews.com. December 8, 2005.

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• When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.

  Wendell Berry

  Government, Citizens, Principles

  Wendell Berry (2012). “The Long-Legged House”, p.27, Counterpoint Press

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• I had just come off of doing a play in Los Angeles which actually got me the role. It was called Bent and it was at the Mark Taper Forum. I was playing a homosexual in 1930 to 1934 Berlin who is eventually put into a concentration camp for the second half of the play. I had lost about 38 pounds for that.

  Patrick Heusinger

  Play, Berlin, Pounds

  "'Jack Reacher' Villain Patrick Heusinger on Playing Opposite Tom Cruise". Interview with Harper's Bazaar, www.harpersbazaar.com. October 24, 2016.

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• If this is the degree of inflation planned for in advance, the real outcome is indeed likely to be such that most of those who will retire at the end of the century will be dependent on the charity of the younger generation. And ultimately not morals but the fact that the young supply the police and the army will decide the issue: concentration camps for the aged unable to maintain themselves are likely to be the fate of an old generation whose income is entirely dependent on coercing the young.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Real, Fate, Army

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Part III. Freedom in the Welfare State, Chap. 19 : Social Security, 1960.

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• NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

  John Brunner

  Military, Epidemics, Race

  John Brunner (2011). “Stand on Zanzibar”, p.73, Macmillan

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• Holocaust is very much a part of present discussion all over the place. There are little plaques everywhere you go around in different neighborhoods. "This person here was prosecuted." "This person was sent to this concentration camp." "A family of Jews lived here. They took over his business." Little, very discrete, very dignified plaques are everywhere.

  Bob Balaban

  Holocaust, Different, Littles

  Source: collider.com

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• Only Communists and Social Democrats who acted against the state were incarcerated. Most of the Communists and Social Democrats I had known became Nazis later. Only those who were doing anything against the state were thrown in concentration camps.

  Fritz Sauckel

  Nazi, Communist, Social

  "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately, 2004.

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• Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

  Al Alvarez

  Art, Imagination, Police

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.271, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail.

  Jean-Marie Le Pen

  War, Book, Two

  Jean-Marie Le Pen's statement in Munich, December 5, 1997.

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• Even before the concentration camps, I felt it was my duty to my ancestors to preserve a world that might cease to exist.

  Roman Vishniac

  World, Might, Duty

  "Testament to a Lost People". www.nytimes.com. 1983.

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• When I visited concentration camps, I was more interested in how people responded to the camps than in the actual places. I watched kids picnicking on the ovens and other people stricken with grief.

  Rachel Whiteread

  Grief, Kids, People

  2001 From an interview on www.guggenheim.org, 18 Apr.

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• Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.

  Ogden Nash

  Lying, Mean, Acceptance

  "A Gleeful Splash of Ogden Nash" by Jonathan Yardley, www.washingtonpost.com. May 08, 2005.

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• For instance, against the tremendous resistance of Hitler and Kaltenbrunner, and at first Himmler too, I managed to save nine thousand Norwegians and Danes, whom I had released from concentration camps.

  Walter Schellenberg

  Nine, Resistance, Firsts

  "The Nuremberg Interviews". Book by Leon Goldensohn, 2004.

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• In South America euphemism appears to be the grisly preserve of violent power. 'Liberty' was the name of the biggest prison in Uruguay under the military dictatorship, while in Chile one of the concentration camps was called 'Dignity.' It was the self-styled 'Peace and Justice' paramilitary group in Chiapas [Mexico] that in 1997 shot 45 peasants in the back, nearly all of them women and children, as they prayed in a church. What have the souls of the south done over the past few decades to deserve quite so much liberty and dignity and peace and justice?

  Isabel Fonseca

  Children, Military, Past

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• Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps.

  Stanley Milgram

  Concentration, Camps

  Stanley Milgram (2017). “Obedience to Authority”, p.11, HarperCollins

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• We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator's power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Rights, Years, Freedom Of Speech

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (1995). “The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt”, Gramercy

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• Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors.

  Woody Allen

  Here And There, Way, Life Is

  "On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy". Book by Eric Lax, 1975.

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• I was born in the middle of the Second World War when the United States dropped their atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when millions of people were dying in concentration camps, when half the planet were colonies that belonged to empires. The word feminism didn't exist. And in my lifetime I have seen all these things improved, changed. We are more connected, more informed. We can fight against stuff together in ways we couldn't before.

  Isabel Allende

  War, Fighting, Hiroshima And Nagasaki

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• I know people could tell incredible stories. People have been in concentration camps, or women being raped, or a man going to war and not recovering from it. People have been robbed and beaten. A lot of people have had strong events in their life, which I didn't.

  Agnes Varda

  Strong, War, Men

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. October 1, 2009.

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