Pol Pot's Quotes

#1. My own reaction from a distance is that Pol Pot's demise as the leader of the Khmer Rouge was inevitable, and that his own paranoia did him in as much as anything else.

Sydney Schanberg

#2. Wars stopped slavery in America and liberated Europe and put an end to Japanese imperialism and killed Hitler and Mussolini and Pol Pot and Che Guevara and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That's why we have them.

David NMI Stone

#3. In Khmer we have a saying that when one is both quite sick and old there remains only one thing, that you die.

Pol Pot

#4. The first time I heard of Tuol Sleng, it was on the Voice of America. I listened twice.

Pol Pot

#5. To kill the grass you must also remove the root

Pol Pot

#6. Pol Pot will surrender, be captured or commit suicide.

Hun Sen

#7. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.

John Pilger

#8. Exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese and purify the masses of the [Cambodian] people.

Pol Pot

#9. The sick are victims of their own imagination.

Pol Pot

#10. For Pol Pot, as for every other kamikaze of Kingdom Come, "the goal was not to destroy but to transmute." We have heard this chiliastic tommyrot before, from a variety of faith-based ethnic cleansers forever seeking to transmute the rest of us to death.

John Leonard

#11. If someone is very hungry, the Angkar will take him where he will be stuffed with food.

Pol Pot

#12. Pol Pot carried out through the years enormous purges against his own followers because of his paranoia.

Sydney Schanberg

#13. I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.

Pol Pot

#14. I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people.

Pol Pot

#15. If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

Pol Pot

#16. I do not reject responsibility - our movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world. But there was another aspect that was outside our control - the enemy's activities against us.

Pol Pot

#17. The Vietnamese ... wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia.

Pol Pot

#18. I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell people I'm a leader.

Pol Pot

#19. When I die, my only wish is that Cambodia remain Cambodia and belong to the West. It is over for communism, and I want to stress that.

Pol Pot

#20. Whoever wishes to blame or attack me is entitled to do so. I regret I didn't have enough experience to totally control the movement. On the other hand, with our constant struggle, this had to be done together with others in the communist world to stop Kampuchea becoming Vietnamese.

Pol Pot

#21. Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.

Pol Pot

#22. I did not join the resistance movement to kill people, to kill the nation. Look at me now. Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.

Pol Pot

#23. It's up to history to judge.

Pol Pot

#24. Pol Pot - he rounded up anybody he thought was intellectual and had them executed. And how he told someone was intellectual or not was whether they wore glasses. If they're that clever, take them off when they see him coming!

Ricky Gervais

#25. He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.

Pol Pot

#26. In the exhibition at Galerie Perrotin, they have the Sarajevo painting - I think it's very good to nail down this story of Pol Pot and other people, not all dictators but most of them.

Erro

#27. I'm quite satisfied on one thing: If we had not carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have become another Kampuchea Krom in 1975.

Pol Pot

#28. For the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed. For Son Sen and his family, yes. I feel sorry for that. That was a mistake that occurred when we put our plan into practice. I feel sorry.

Pol Pot

#29. There's what we did wrong and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people - by us and also by the enemy - but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now.

Pol Pot

#30. Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.

Pol Pot

#31. We want only peace, to build up our country. World opinion is paying great attention to the threat against Democratic Kampuchea. They are anxious. They fear Kampuchea cannot oppose the Vietnamese. This could hurt the interests of the Southeast Asian countries and all of the world's countries.

Pol Pot

#32. For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son [Stalin], so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.

Austin 3:16

#33. Hunger is the most effective disease.

Pol Pot

#34. We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.

Pol Pot

#35. If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar will put aside a small piece of land for you.

Pol Pot

#36. I came to join the revolution, not to kill the Cambodian people. Look at me now. Am I a violent person? No. So, as far as my conscience and my mission were concerned, there was no problem.

Pol Pot

#37. It's the camel's nose in the tent. Look at Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin
every one of these monsters, on seizing power, their first act was to confiscate all firearms in private hands ...

Charlton Heston