Philip Gourevitch Quotes

#1. Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together.

Philip Gourevitch

#2. What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.

Philip Gourevitch

#3. A serious pacifist approach can't win wars against enemies whose only program is violence. That doesn't mean I think the US has fought terrorists so wisely most of the time since 9/11. But there are some enemies that need to be destroyed by force lest they destroy much much more.

Philip Gourevitch

#4. In our world photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.

Philip Gourevitch

#5. Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.

Philip Gourevitch

#6. Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.

Philip Gourevitch

#7. Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.

Philip Gourevitch

#8. Political corruption is to Rhode Islanders as smog is to people who live in Los Angeles: nobody complains of its absence, but when it rolls around everyone feels right at home.

Philip Gourevitch

#9. I couldn't help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city
and, although we don't like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

Philip Gourevitch

#10. An animal will kill, but never to completely annihilate a race, a whole collectively. What does this make us in this world?

Philip Gourevitch

#11. Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. 'Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it's written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.

Philip Gourevitch

#12. As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world's powers go, (Rwanda) might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world's powers left Rwanda to it.

Philip Gourevitch

#13. Novels are nice,' my friend said. 'They stop.' He waggled his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. 'They say, 'The End.' Very nice. A marvelous invention. Here we have stories, but never 'The End.

Philip Gourevitch

#14. When you're that resigned and oppressed you're already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victims of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi. They were being killed for so long that they were already dead.

Philip Gourevitch

#15. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

Philip Gourevitch

#16. Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Philip Gourevitch

#17. Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island's flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci - a paragon of charisma and corruption.

Philip Gourevitch