Top 100 Quotes About Refugees
#1. To the north the Indonesian Air Force strafed Australian ships that were attempting to repel refugees from Indonesia and Timor and Papua. In
James Bradley
#2. Europe is creating the flight of refugees that's tearing it apart politically, and leading rightwing nationalist parties to gain power to withdraw from the Eurozone.
Michael Hudson
#3. There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
Haruki Murakami
#4. We need to destroy ISIS in the caliphate. That's - that should be our objective. The refugee issue will be solved if we destroy ISIS there, which means we need to have a no-fly zone, safe zones there for refugees and to build a military force.
Jeb Bush
#5. The way a government treats refugees is very instructive ...
Tony Benn
#6. The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.
A.E. Samaan
#7. Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.
Ronald Reagan
#8. If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.
Richard Flanagan
#9. On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#10. I approached UNHCR because I believe in what the United Nations. I believe refugees are the most vulnerable people in the world. They are affected by everything, including landmines. They are vulnerable to everything.
Angelina Jolie
#11. I know I'm not going to say good-bye. And if these staggering refugees want to help, if they think they see something bigger here than a boy chasing a girl, then they can help, and we'll see what happens when we say yes while the rigor mortis world screams no.
Isaac Marion
#12. I see the sharp inequality between how Haitian and Cuban refugees are treated in Florida. Both groups come here because their lives are equally desperate. But on arrival, the Haitians are incarcerated, and some are immediately repatriated, whereas Cubans get to stay and are eligible for citizenship.
Edwidge Danticat
#13. Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity. They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more
Pope Francis
#14. The time has come to end the suffering and the plight of millions of Palestine refugees in the homeland and the Diaspora, to end their displacement and to realize their rights, some of them forced to take refuge more than once in different places of the world.
Mahmoud Abbas
#15. I was impressed by a program called New Roots, which helps women refugees from countries in conflict to start new lives in the U.S. by farming. They are trained in a four-year program, at the end of which New Roots helps them find their own land to farm and live on.
Rebecca Pidgeon
#16. In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.
Thomas Harding
#17. Banning refugees from fleeing west Africa is like shuttering up the windows while a house burns down,
Sarah Hanson-Young
#18. Wilderness is not a place of isolation but contemplation. Refuge. Refugees.....Wilderness is a knife that cuts through pretense and exposes fear. Even in remote country, you cannot escape your mind.
Terry Tempest Williams
#19. I'd like there to be less refugees. I'd like all girls to go to school. That's what we need to be thinking about, and working on making our own families good and strong and our own kids happy.
Angelina Jolie
#20. The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies - unless one counts journalists.
George Orwell
#21. Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.
Golda Meir
#23. When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.
Brandon Stanton
#24. Today three-quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced: there are 5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the world.
Ismail Haniyeh
#25. While helping hundreds of thousands of refugees, Red Cross volunteers undoubtedly heard stories of Nazi brutality and rumors of mass gassings and they noted those rumors and kept an eye out for any evidence of them, but they saw nothing to indicate that the rumors were true.
David Duke
#26. As I got older, I had more experience with borders. Some literal - living in the dramatically blue misty mountains on the line between North Carolina and Tennessee, and living in California - home to expats, transplants, and refugees from both sides of innumerable borders.
Tim Pratt
#27. Kosovo is too close to Europe. It is not only close to Albania, it is close to Greece, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, where there are still many Kosovo refugees. Spontaneous reactions could multiply.
Fatos Nano
#28. Refugees have done more for my heart and my spirit than I can ever express in words.
Angelina Jolie
#29. We have a very structured process for taking in refugees. It takes almost two years to transition from another country into the United States through the refugee process.
James Lankford
#30. We will stop the terrorist attacks before they occur because we will not be prisoners to political correctness. Rather, we will speak the truth. Border security is national security and we will not be admitting jihadists as refugees.
Ted Cruz
#31. I got a job as a human rights and refugees officer, working on youth-based projects. But I realized all the kids I was working with were far more into 'The Daily Show' than the policy briefings.
Hannah Simone
#32. Although some Jews "traveled by donkey," the Jews of Spain, for the most part, walked out of their country. These refugees were the "scholars, the sons and daughters of families who had served their monarchs . . . shoemakers, tanners, butchers, the old, the pregnant, [and] the young."6
Gloria Golden
#33. I wish to call on you to join hands in the building of a world in which less people will be forced to flee, and in which refugees are protected until they can safely return home one day.
Sadako Ogata
#34. A rabble-rouser from the UN high commission for refugees ... the former magi who resigned in protest against purification ... plus a girl ... and a dog.
Mamoru Oshii
#35. The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration.
Thomas Harding
#36. This should be a true peace, which leads to the end of occupation and aggression, to the return of refugees to their homes, to the destruction of the dividing wall, and the establishment of a political status for East Jerusalem.
Khaled Mashal
#37. Syrian refugees might be Isis, they may be the great Trojan horse of all time.
Donald Trump
#38. We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
Chris Cleave
#39. The refugees leave a refuge, enter a refuge run to the windows, what they see makes them move on, they move, refuge means move, move moves on into madness, my book I say is on the move, we are moving each other
Helene Cixous
#40. Millions of people have become refugees and beggars when violent extremists have overthrown governments. Should this happen in Saudi Arabia, the first action taken would be to behead or burn to death every Saudi royal.
Jean Sasson
#41. The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.
Mary McCarthy
#42. Many of the self-described "political refugees" who come here make stopovers in other countries on their way to the U.S., in places where they would be free to have as many children as they want. But they choose to continue on to the U.S. Why? Because it is more economically attractive.
Ed Koch
#43. We shouldn't have a program where we just say that we're going to take care of the world's refugees. Nobody in the Middle East is doing anything. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait - all the Gulf nations are doing nothing.
Rand Paul
#44. You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base.
Anthony Bourdain
#46. The mercy caravans are through there the medicine refugees flowing out. It makes the United States look very bad here. And much more like an occupation force than it did before.
Jon Lee Anderson
#47. Since the peace treaties
of 1919 and 1920, the refugees and
the stateless have attached themselves
like a curse to all the newly
established states on earth which
were created in the image of the
nation-state.
Hannah Arendt
#48. I come from a family of refugees. I'm used to surviving and going with the flow, and what happened to me was just life.
Yasmine Al Masri
#49. He walks through the river of refugees and soldiers, giving purpose and direction to people who would otherwise be lost.
Susan Ee
#50. In times of war, you often hear leaders - Christian, Jewish, and Muslim - saying, 'God is on our side.' But that isn't true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.
Greg Mortenson
#51. If there are more and more environmental refugees, they are going to end up on your doorstep too.
Nina Fedoroff
#52. These are the ashes of fiery weather,
Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,
Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,
Like beautiful and abandonded refugees.
Wallace Stevens
#53. We open our door, and we are still committed to open our door for our brothers in Syria. But doesn't mean that we should not keep alone. The international community should really - should really share Lebanon the numbers of refugees and share Lebanon the cost of their living.
Najib Mikati
#54. Most of the approaches to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, have been directed at trying to resolve the most complex problems, like refugees and Jerusalem, which is akin to building the pyramid from the top down.
Benjamin Netanyahu
#55. There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.
Louis MacNeice
#57. I believe that the majority of people in Europe want to demonstrate solidarity with the refugees.
Martin Schulz
#58. In countries where people have to flee their homes because of persecution and violence, political solutions must be found, peace and tolerance restored, so that refugees can return home. In my experience, going home is the deepest wish of most refugees.
Angelina Jolie
#59. The route for the refugees currently goes through Greece and the Balkans or through Italy; if there were a crisis in north-eastern Europe, Poland might just as well be affected. In this case we are dealing with mechanisms that we do not control. We need to change that.
Paolo Gentiloni
#60. While the war in Iraq was raging, I spent some time in neighbouring Jordan, meeting with Iraqi refugees who fled their country to try to find some place of safety. I interviewed many families about what had happened to them and what they did as a result.
Deborah Ellis
#61. We call on the international community to share equitably the responsibility for protecting, assisting and hosting refugees in accordance with principles of international solidarity and human rights.
Widad Akreyi
#62. Middle Eastern wars rarely end with outright victory and permanent stability, so the word 'settlement' may promise too much. At best, for many years, it may simply mean stable ceasefire lines, reduced bloodshed, fewer refugees, and less terrorism.
David Ignatius
#63. Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.
Richard Flanagan
#64. When was the last time you heard news accounts of a boatload of American refugees arrive on the shores of another country?
Marco Rubio
#65. Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own.
Andrei Codrescu
#66. The attack on Dresden, which was overflowing with refugees, on February 13th 1945 caused around 250,000 dead.
Konrad Adenauer
#67. The answer is to let Israel say it will recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, release the prisoners, and recognize the rights of the refugees to return to Palestine. Hamas will have a position if this occurs.
Ismail Haniyeh
#68. The club survived though and became a symbol of hope and pride for over half a million refugees scattered across Azerbaijan, many of whom still live in temporary settlements within a few kilometers of the frontline.
Arthur Huizinga
#69. Sharon Shinn's Samaria is a world populated by refugees from a ravaged Earth, also many, many years in the future.
Alethea Kontis
#70. We lived in St. Tropez when I was young, and there were a lot of Vietnamese refugees in France at the time, after the war. My mother had many Vietnamese friends who entertained a lot, and she was taught how to make that spring roll. She would make them all the time.
Eric Ripert
#71. I always work with refugees and I think they are the most amazing people and it's a privilege to spend time with them, so I will always.
Angelina Jolie
#72. People have accused me at times of having too big of a heart.But I have to also to say I must keep the people of my state safe. So we take a pause [in taking refugees].
John Kasich
#73. The very concept of home has become tarnished, misty, elusive. As never before, we are living in a rootless age. So many of us are refugees, living out of suitcases, car trunks, cardboard boxes, desperate to go back to a home that no longer exists.
Chris Atack
#74. The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don't understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars - many of which this country has had a hand in. Although
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#75. We are surviving, in this pleasant liberal enclave where people read and speak freely, on borrowed time. But for those not inside - the dispossessed of the world, the poor, the refugees and those forced into exile - existence is wasteland.
Hanif Kureishi
#76. If a Cuban refugee is escaping, we're saying they're a political refugee, but why isn't a Haitian refugee a political refugee? They're escaping the capitalism and degradation of economic imperialism. We don't call them political refugees; we call them unfortunate people.
Ian Svenonius
#77. J&K, why refugees can vote in the Lok Sabha but not in state polls,
Anonymous
#78. Tens of thousands of North Korean women have been sold to Chinese men. By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men.
Barbara Demick
#79. I'm in total sympathy with Dick Smith's sentiments; I only wish there were grounds for saying we Australians would never tolerate such appalling treatment of refugees being carried out in our name.
Hugh Mackay
#80. The solution to the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.
Hannah Arendt
#81. My strength is looking for composition and light, and I think those things come in the quieter times of war or photographing people affected on the margins of war - civilians, refugees; that is where I really excel.
Lynsey Addario
#82. Apart from my children, spending time with refugees was the greatest gift ... the greatest life lesson I could ever receive.
Angelina Jolie
#83. The U.N. had such lofty goals to eliminate poverty and stop war and cure diseases and help refugees - things that no one country could do.
Ted Turner
#84. Thus, on this World Refugee Day, let us take time to recognize and draw inspiration from these ordinary people who have shown such extraordinary courage - the world's millions of refugees and displaced.
Antonio Guterres
#85. If you grant asylum to so many refugees, your house may be sacked sooner by the soldiers; I see that clearly. The question is, however, whether, because of this danger, you should refuse to practice such a beautiful virtue as charity.
Vincent De Paul
#86. I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees.
Malala Yousafzai
#87. My record label always says you shouldn't talk about money because it makes people extremely uncomfortable. Refugees can't talk about money. Rappers can talk about money; refugees can't talk about money.
M.I.A.
#88. Refugees come from many different backgrounds and live in many different circumstances, so I wouldn't like to generalise. But I think refugees from the U.K. would probably be healthier and better fed than those from many other countries.
Gillian Cross
#89. We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return
David Ben-Gurion
#90. The arrival of thousands of Muslim infiltrators to Israeli territory is a clear threat to the state's Jewish identity. The refugees' place is not among us, and the initiative to transfer them to Australia is the right and just solution.
Danny Danon
#91. Childhood depression tends to be more common in inner cities, being most frequently related to serious social deprivation, bullying, domestic violence, wartime experience and famine. It is, for example, a serious problem among children who are traumatised refugees.
Robert Winston
#92. During the early days following the Catacendre, refugees from Terris had written down memories of their homeland, as no Keepers had remained.
Brandon Sanderson
#93. Australia will take more refugees from Syria in response to the growing international crisis but it will not increase the total number of asylum seekers it accepts.
Tony Abbott
#94. On his [Marco Rubio] Gang of Eight bill, he would have liberalized immigration, but he did not - and he steadfastly opposed any new border security requirements for refugees or students.
Ted Cruz
#95. We are all wanderers and travellers, refugees and pilgrims until we return once more to the stars.
David Almond
#96. According to the reports we have gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appears that around 10,000 people have been killed in more than 100 massacres. The final toll may be much worse,
Geoff Hoon
#97. Nothing but physical impossibility, lack of space and money would make me close my doors to Allied refugees.
Edith Cavell
#98. Today, as yesterday, a nation is judged by its attitude towards refugees,
Elie Wiesel
#99. I said, we should allow no Syrian refugees into the country, not even women or children.
Lawrence O'Donnell
#100. Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
Loren Eiseley
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