Extermination Quotes

1. "...while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžic frequented a bar called Mad House - Luda kuca. Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serbs' military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karadžic performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically."
Author: Aleksandar Hemon

2. "How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We've all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks wonder how the Germans could have done it? I believe part of the answer is: They made extermination be a nine-to-five activity. You know, salaries? Lunch breaks? And the staff came and did their job and went home and ate supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job and went home and ate their supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job. --That's partly how you get anything done, especially a chore what's dreadful, dreadful. -- Honey? we've all got to be real careful of what we can get used to."
Author: Allan Gurganus

3. "MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada."
Author: Ambrose Bierce

4. "Au temps de La Barbarie à visage humain, je disais, comme Camus : l'idéologie est un multiplicateur de massacres ; on tue d'autant plus, et en d'autant plus grand nombre, qu'on le fait dans la bonne conscience de hâter, ce faisant, l'avènement du Bien - communisme, fascisme, angélismes exterminateurs de toutes sortes, ivresse logique des assassins. (...) non ; c'est le contraire ; le pire ce sont les massacres aveugles ; le plus redoutable ce sont les exterminations que rien ne déclenche mais que rien, du coup, n'est capable d'arrêter ; gare à ceux pour qui le fait de tuer un homme n'a pas plus de sens ni d'importance que de trancher une tête de chou ! gare au démon, non de l'Absolu, mais du Néant ! (ch. 10De l'insensé, encore)"
Author: Bernard Henri Lévy

5. "To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need for our civ ilisation; but no such system has a chance while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day"
Author: Bertrand Russell

6. "But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record."
Author: Charles Darwin

7. "To aid and abet in the destruction of a single species or in the extermination of a single tribe is to commit a crime against God, a mortal sin against Mother Nature. Better by far to sacrifice in some degree the interests of mechanical civilization, curtail our gluttonous appetite for things, ever more things, learn to moderate our needs, and most important, and not difficult, learn to control, limit and gradually reduce our human numbers. We humans swarm over the planet like a plague of locusts, multiplying and devouring. There is no justice, sense or decency in this mindless global breeding spree, this obscene anthropoid fecundity, this industrialized mass production of babies and bodies, ever more bodies and babies. The man-centered view of the world in anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinature, antilife, and--antihuman."
Author: Edward Abbey

8. "Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood."
Author: Federica Montseny

9. "When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men."
Author: Frantz Fanon

10. "The ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

11. "Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly."
Author: George Bernard Shaw

12. "At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary, more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox."
Author: George Bernard Shaw

13. "Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings."
Author: Gerald Durrell

14. "From that imbalance rose the tragic results of the coming together of two worlds. It was the extermination of an ancient dream by the frenzy of a modern one, the destruction of myths by a desire for power. It was gold, modern weapons, and rational thought pitted against magic and gods: the outcome could not have been otherwise."
Author: J.M.G. Le Clézio

15. "Men are fighting... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being."
Author: Ludwig Von Mises

16. "Just as a state's police swear to prevent and punish murder, so the signers of the Genocide Convention [in 1948] swore to police a brave new world order. The rhetoric of moral utopia is a peculiar response to genocide. But those were heady days, just after the trials at Nuremberg, when the full scale of the Nazi extermination of Jews all over Europe had been recognized as a fact of which nobody could any longer claim ignorance. The authors and signers of the Genocide Convention knew perfectly well that they had not fought World War II to stop the Holocaust but rather--and often, as in the case of the United States, reluctantly--to contain fascist aggression. What made those victorious powers, which dominated the UN then even more than they do now, imagine that they would act differently in the future?"
Author: Philip Gourevitch

17. "How is it that, once victory took form and the horrible spectacle of the extermination camps was revealed, we could have shamelessly broken the promises given to the peoples in those years of ordeal?"
Author: Rene Cassin

18. "This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades. —by Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam"
Author: Sol Stern

19. "Extermination of city could be preventedby presence of a few who have faith of God."
Author: Toba Beta

20. "Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale?"
Author: Wilfred Burchett

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