Quotes About Concentration Camps

#1. Spiritual people are often persecuted because of their beliefs. Christians were fed to the lions. Jews were slaughtered in concentration camps. Various forms of persecution still exist today throughout the world.

Frederick Lenz

#2. My mother had a horrific life. At fourteen, she was in the Nazi concentration camps. Her sense about life now is, every day above ground is a good day.

Gene Simmons

#3. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

Viktor E. Frankl

#4. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war.

George Orwell

#5. 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

#6. Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps ... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.

Leon Trotsky

#7. I never exploited my father's role in helping Jews avoid the concentration camps.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#8. The world's been turned upside down. The most decent people are being sent to concentration camps, prisons and lonely cells, while the lowest of the low rule over young and old, rich and poor.

Anne Frank

#9. 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 one calls a detail.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

#10. When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

#11. Today, most people are unaware that of the eleven million people exterminated, five million were not even Jewish. In Dachau, one of the largest and most infamous of all concentration camps, only a third of the population was Jewish.

Andy Andrews

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

Roman Vishniac

#13. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

Norman Finkelstein

#14. Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.

Alva Myrdal

#15. I want to make my contribution to humanity so that there will be no more Auschwitzes. Children who are born wanted and are given love and attention will not build concentration camps.

Henry Morgentaler

#16. The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil.

Richard Rodriguez

#17. Dachau-the significance of this name will never be erased from German history. It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory.

Eugen Kogon

#18. Women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps ... they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

Betty Friedan

#19. 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

#20. The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States.

Lea Salonga

#21. Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on a vacant face.

Ayn Rand

#22. Prisons are like the concentration camps of our time. So many go in and never come out, and primarily they're black and Latino.

Lisa Bonet

#23. During the Nuremberg trials, Oswald Pohl, an SS Lieutenant General, ... is shown here explaining how Farben operated such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

G. Edward Griffin

#24. Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

Mark Hoppus

#25. In the Second World War, they're talking about the Japanese traitors and putting them into concentration camps. But companies like DuPont had factories in Germany turning out stuff for the German Army.

Rob Walton

#26. I think my whole life has been shaped by my childhood incarceration in America's concentration camps.

George Takei

#27. It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

James Laughlin

#28. When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the middle of hell from Auschwitz, to let the world know what happened. The texts were buried beneath the ground and found after the liberation of the concentration camps.

Laszlo Nemes

#29. 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

#30. As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

Judith Butler

#31. I spoke the language the sentences that had lied their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the worlds first concentration camps.

Bryce Courtenay

#32. Feminism has fought no wars ... killed no opponents ... set up no concentration camps ... starved no enemies ... practiced no cruelty. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety in the streets ... for reforms in the law.

Dale Spender

#33. Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.

Rachel Maddow

#34. Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

Graham Greene

#35. Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps ...

Stanley Milgram

#36. In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.

Elie Wiesel

#37. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

Christopher Hitchens

#38. They were handsome, proper and normal family fathers who built the concentration camps and whipped the prisoners to death. And who was Nietzsche? A narcotized syphilitic.

Jens Bjorneboe

#39. Concentration camps were entirely a matter for the police and had nothing to do with the administration.

Hans Frank

#40. Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses.

Ingrid Newkirk

#41. 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

#42. On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality.

Hannah Arendt

#43. I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawai'i now and putting them in concentration camps.

Francis Biddle

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.

Charlie Chaplin

#47. No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.

Albert Speer

#48. She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.

Thrity Umrigar

#49. When there are no gas chambers, no barbed wire, and no concentration camps, many don't recognize the perpetration of new genocides and other targeted mass atrocity crimes because they may not look the same.

John Prendergast

#50. For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.

Anne Holm

#51. When I came to power, I did not want the concentration camps to become old age pensioners homes, but instruments of terror.

Adolf Hitler

#52. I don't want any more concentration camps for animals that are cruelly treated, force-fed to fatten themselves up for our consumption.

Steve Wynn

#53. Adults," Phillips writes, "are not less excessive in their behavior than adolescents. Concentration camps were not run by adolescents; adolescents are not mostly alcoholics or millionaires.

Jennifer Senior

#54. In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

Gore Vidal

#55. Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.

Martha Gellhorn

#56. From the Soviet gulag to the Nazi concentration camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, history teaches that granting the state legal authority to kill innocent individuals has dreadful consequences.

Pete Du Pont

#57. By a conservative estimate, twelve million people perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Most were murdered in cold blood, but countless others died by starvation, illness, and suicide.

Miklos Nyiszli

#58. There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

Martha Gellhorn

#59. 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

#60. I'm not talking about YOUR book now, but look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed ... Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.

Art Spiegelman

#61. Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.

Neil Nakadate

#62. Some days in the camp you prayed to live; some days you prayed to die quick. Some days you didn't bother praying, knowing there was no sense to anything.

Allan Dare Pearce

#63. When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

Viktor E. Frankl