Top 100 Refugee Quotes
#1. I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time.
Isabel Allende
#2. Children, together with women, constitute 90 percent of all refugee populations on the planet as well as the vast majority of those living in absolute poverty: the 'feminization of poverty' means that children are poor, too, since most parenting is done by mothers.
Robin Morgan
#3. I had a lovely experience once in Africa working with the UN when a president of a country met me about refugee issues and said 'What do you do?' I said 'I'm an actor.' He replied 'I heard that was a very difficult job and might not be the smartest job to do.' It was lovely.
Angelina Jolie
#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. While I regard the Nakba as an ongoing crime that needs to be prosecuted and reversed ... Shavit defends its necessity and lectures Palestinians trapped in squalid refugee camps to just get over it.
Max Blumenthal
#6. My first experience in the Netherlands was very pleasant, extremely pleasant. I mean, I got my residence permit, refugee status, within four weeks of arrival. People treated me extremely well.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#7. We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.
Ariel Dorfman
#8. There's no such thing as a young refugee; every migrant has a past they've fled from, and how can you be young when you already have one life behind you?
Lev Golinkin
#9. I'm a partisan, too. I'm in favor of AUTHENTICITY. US State Department veteran and U.N. refugee official Wendy Chamberlain
Ron Suskind
#10. The refugee in Syria doesn't benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who's going through a divorce.
Brene Brown
#11. My favorite charity is the Women's Refugee Commission and the Nomi network.
Mamie Gummer
#12. Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.
Nancy Gibbs
#13. Driving through the refugee camp made us think about how embarrassingly frivolous most of our problems are.
Brad Van Orden
#14. I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!
Lawrence Durrell
#15. In 1934, the American Jewish charities offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children. We were on the SS Washington, bound for New York, Christmas 1934.
Jack Steinberger
#17. Pat Conroy embraced his new hometown with the grateful passion of a refugee.
William Grimes
#18. Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.
Jonas Mekas
#19. Jesus wept:
This Prophet, Priest, King
Has a: Holy, Priesthood, Chosen!
This Refugee, Homeless, Healer
Has a Celebrity, TV, Mega - church?
God business to show business.
Where did it go wrong?
Jesus weeps.
David Holdsworth
#20. Displaced societies are of value. Their issues are our issues.
Cynthia Basinet
#21. Marisa starts to snoop. I might as well too. It's not often that I get to visit a water pellet company in a freaky refugee nation. -from Fireseed One
Catherine Stine
#22. Modern man is a hard driven nomad without any stability, not (as the Bible has it) a wanderer or a pilgrim, but a refugee-an escapist. Instead of meditation and reflection there is only speed, fear and distraction.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#23. In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings - £500 - with a desire to be "a window in [her] home."577
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#24. 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
#25. Terry Farish seems to breathe the reader into the emotional spaces of war, exile, and refugee life. The Good Braider is a delicate stunning exploration of its young protagonist's life and heart.
Uma Krishnaswami
#26. The particular refugee camp we were in, they were hungry for play, they were hungry for any kind of normalcy.
Connie Sellecca
#27. A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Anne Carson
#28. I've taken clowns into the war in Bosnia, the refugee camps of Kosovo, and none of those are any more important than clowning in a subway or an elevator or just walking down the street.
Patch Adams
#29. The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel--happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, resentful to pay taxes. The left sees prejudice.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
#30. World Refugee Day is a reminder that there is no 'us' and 'them.' There is only us, one human family, connected in ways we sometimes forget.
Ann Curry
#31. It is not enough to defend our values at home, in our newspapers and in our institutions. We also have to defend them in the refugee camps of the Middle East, and the ruined ghost towns of Syria.
Angelina Jolie
#32. Our children will be told what Israel has done.' graffiti on the Wall in Bethlehem, opposite Aida refugee camp, 2008
William Parry
#33. There's evidence that one of the Paris attackers may have entered Europe posing as a refugee.
Audie Cornish
#34. A big refugee camp governed by real terror and artificially pumped-up optimism - like the bastard child of Butlins and Colditz.
M.R. Carey
#35. I think of Superman as the ultimate vanilla hero. He's this perfect refugee, this perfect immigrant from another planet who embodies the American dream.
Antje Traue
#36. 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
#37. I grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda, and I lived there for 30 years. That shapes one's character.
Paul Kagame
#38. After the outbreak of war, in April 1940, we left Geneva with our three children aged 4 years, 2 years and 2 weeks only to become part of the disordered refugee crowds fleeing across France from the German army.
James Meade
#39. Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#40. I have been a refugee for the last forty years in the luminous land of opportunity. Still my heart is aching with hiraeth for my native land.
Debasish Mridha
#41. I have taken many lives in my life. Many children, perhaps husbands, wives, parents. Perhaps it is only just that this same violation was inflicted upon me. Perhaps it is just that one who lives a life of war becomes a refugee from it.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#42. Only in America could a refugee girl from Central Europe become secretary of state.
Madeleine Albright
#43. We looked as if we'd been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband's funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City.
Chris Cleave
#44. we are the boat
returning to dock
we are the footprints
on the northern trail
we are the iron
coloring the soil
we cannot
be erased
Remi Kanazi
#45. If I'm doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I'll go to her tent; I'll follow her when she's working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.
Lynsey Addario
#46. My father came by himself across the North Korean border when he was seventeen. And hasn't seen his brothers or sisters or parents since then. And he died some time ago, but never saw any of his relatives. My mother was a refugee in war-torn Korea.
Jim Yong Kim
#47. the worst subsistence humanism promotes lies in refugee of denigration on mere inventions for their own brothers
Abdul Rehman
#48. 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
#50. Doesn't the world see the suffering of millions of Palestinians who have been living in exile around the world or in refugee camps for the past 60 years? No state, no home, no identity, no right to work. Doesn't the world see this injustice?
Ismail Haniyeh
#51. Still,
the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile
patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year
of 1948
Susan Abulhawa
#52. Lose your freedom, and become a slave by borrowing.
Auliq Ice
#53. In 2013 we had never faced a crisis like the Syrian refugee crisis now. Up until that point, a refugee meant someone fleeing oppression, fleeing Communism like it is in my community.
Marco Rubio
#54. You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#55. A lasting solution, the possibility to begin a new life, is the only dignified solution for the refugee himself.
Poul Hartling
#56. That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.
Les Aspin
#57. As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, the story of how you survived and triumphed matters. For every story that belongs to you, in time, belongs to America.
Andrew Lam
#58. I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.
Spalding Gray
#59. But if the world measures a refugee according to the worst story, we will always excuse human suffering, saying it is not yet as bad as someone else's.
Victoria Armour-Hileman
#60. Freedom-loving people around the world must say ... I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.
Ronald Reagan
#61. 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
#62. I would like the refugee crisis to become a new beginning in the Turkish-European relationship. But it would be very problematic if, during this process, human rights were forgotten. Democracy needs to be the priority.
Elif Safak
#63. 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
#64. My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.
Eugene Jarecki
#65. Refugee problems can only be solved in the region (of origin) - maybe with a little help from the UN. Governments must provide something for their countries. They need to deliver.
Yoweri Museveni
#66. From Shore To Shore
Our Message of Love & Peace
To ALL OUR Kids
Widad Akreyi
#67. A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.
Barack Obama
#68. But unlike Mama, I would not go to heaven. My secrets padlocked the gates. I'd be a torn kite stuck in the dead branches of a tree, unable to fly.
Ruta Sepetys
#69. While every refugee's story is different and their anguish personal, they all share a common thread of uncommon courage - the courage not only to survive, but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives.
Antonio Guterres
#70. I'm walking insecurity. Without all this makeup, I look like a refugee when I get up in the morning ... I generally look like one major bowwow. I mean arf.
Connie Chung
#71. The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures ... They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.
Allan Bloom
#72. wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp
and hold every child,
cover their ears
so they wouldn't have to hear the sound of bombing
for the rest of their life the way I do..
Rafeef Ziadah
#73. Marial and Uncle were no longer by his side, and they never would be again, but Salva knew that both of them would have wanted him to survive, to finish the trip and reach the Itang refugee camp safely. It was almost as if they had left their strength with him, to help him on his journey.
Linda Sue Park
#74. 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
#75. There's nothing like living as a refugee in one's own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.
Barbara Kingsolver
#76. Seeds of destruction take root in the human heart, and even among those who long for peace, they call to our darker instincts and urge us to violence.:
Victoria Armour-Hileman
#77. 'The Daily Mail' interviewed my friends in Jamaica to find out if I was ever the victim of a vicious homophobic attack because, to them, I'm a gay refugee. But nothing like that happened. So, no surprise, that story didn't appear. I'm really pretty boring.
Marlon James
#78. I believe in the promise of America. Being a Cuban refugee, having come here when I was eight, I know that this is a shining city on the hill.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
#79. The choice is not between the current crisis and blissful isolation. The choice is between the current crisis and an orderly, managed system of mass migration. You can have one or the other. There is no easy middle ground
Patrick Kingsley
#80. Those who find ecstasy do so not by visiting the shrines of civilization but by trudging in the swamps of human destitution and misery. Our literature of ecstasy recounts the dark nights of the soul and encounters with mystics in the slums and in the refugee camps of genocidal wars.
Alphonso Lingis
#81. People whose lives were determined for them by a group of politicians whose severing, dissecting and reattaching of their lands has turned their world into a monster that not even its creator can control.
Aysha Taryam
#82. I have lived my life defined as a refugee in Nepal and India, a resident alien and immigrant in the United States. At last, I am a Tibetan in Tibet, a Khampa in Kham, albeit as a tourist in my occupied and tethered country.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
#83. We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.
Eugene Jarecki
#84. Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.
Richard Engel
#85. Let us remind our leaders that there is no place for personal interests in politics.
Mohith Agadi
#86. Nothing but physical impossibility, lack of space and money would make me close my doors to Allied refugees.
Edith Cavell
#87. The moon rode in the sky - a hunted thing dodging behind wisps of tattered cloud, and the air was heavy and wet and redolent of dying leaves. ("The Refugee")
Jane Dixon Rice
#88. Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of threes or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refugee in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.
Max Porter
#89. Every heart to Love will come, but like a refugee
Leonard Cohen
#90. Every time, every time a tourist or an immigrant or a refugee shows up in another country there's a security risk.
Justin Trudeau
#91. Liadia broke the Wraith Alliance."
Black Knife stilled. "How do you know that?"
"A refugee told me."
"Who?"
"I didn't ask for a name. I didn't want you to go after anyone, if you found out."
He tilted his head a fraction. "You don't trust me?"
"Of course not. You're a vigilante.
Jodi Meadows
#92. I believe that mountains do affect one's personality, if one can remain among them long enough; and if Sunil had grown up in the hills instead of in a refugee township, I have no doubt he would have been a completely different person.
Ruskin Bond
#93. I own a shameless number of ethnic necklaces acquired at local markets in developing countries or inherited from my grandmother. These have seen me through meetings in Davos and visits to refugee camps.
Leila Janah
#94. The refugee resettlement program is a kind of worldwide business. There is pressure to keep the numbers up even as you are struggling with the people who do come in.
Romano L. Mazzoli
#95. For a start, people who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers
Patrick Kingsley
#96. I'll work to ensure that every single refugee who seeks asylum in the United States has a fair chance to tell his or her story. This is the least we can offer people fleeing persecution and devastation.
Hillary Clinton
#97. People have been born in refugee camps and they are getting tired of that.
Javier Bardem
#98. If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.
Tony Abbott
#99. I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.
Iman
#100. But I also said it was up to you to decide what kind of monster you wanted to become. And what I saw that night in the dungeon, at the refugee camp, facing down Sarren ... it gave me something I have not felt in a long time. It gave me hope.
Julie Kagawa