A Quote by Raphael Lemkin

By genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.

Raphael Lemkin

Quote Topics

Destruction Ethnic Genocide Group Mean Nation

Quote Author

Raphael Lemkin
Armenian - Lawyer
June 24, 1900 - August 28, 1959

The Jews cannot be classed as a 'race' per se, they are an ethnic group. '...the Jews form an ethnic group; that like all ethnic groups they have their own racial elements distributed in their own proportions; like all or most ethnic groups they have their 'look,' a part of their cultural heritage that both preserves and expresses their cultural solidarity...they have developed a special racial sub-type and a special pattern of facial and bodily expression.

Carleton S. Coon

The term "genocide" is often incorrectly assumed to mean extreme examples of mass murder associated with war, with the death of millions of individuals, as, for instance in Cambodia. Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

There's an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he's a member of your ethnic group.

Jonathan Haidt

A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

I don't think nations can stand aside for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

John Major

Genocide, in my opinion - is an attempt by a powerful group completely to eradicate from the face of the Earth the existence of people because of their ethnic makeup or because of their race or religion, and that was the case with Hitler trying to exterminate the Jews, and that was the case in Rwanda, when the Tutsis were attacked and over 500,000 were killed in two or three days.

Jimmy Carter

There is no ethnic cleansing in Bahrain, no mass genocide, no policy of killing innocent people.

Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

Arundhati Roy

We're living in an age of genocide. ...And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program....of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide.... [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off.

Dorothy Day

Genocide involves the attempt to achieve the disappearance of a group by whatever means. It does not have to be violent, it could be a combination of policies that would lead to a certain group dying out.

Malcolm Fraser

The relationship between heredity and IQ in human beings is well established. But that does not mean that if you have a group difference, an ethnic difference, that difference must also be genetic.

Charles Murray

I didn't want to create a makeup line for one ethnic group; it had to be multi-ethnic. To me, beauty is beauty. It doesn't matter to me what colour the skin is.

Francois Nars

Recent events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reaffirmed for me, however, the complete folly of any Republican strategy to increase black representation in the Republican Party by appeals based on race. Whatever the name- 'African American Outreach' or 'Black Republicans for Bush'- any effort to attract blacks or any other ethnic group to the Republican party, based on explicit or implicit appeals to race or ethnic identity, are not only a waste of time and resources, but are also misguided and potentially quite damaging to the nation.

Ward Connerly

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor's own nationals.

Raphael Lemkin

Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.