Top 690 Syrian Refugees Quotes & Sayings - Page 10

My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.

If we offer something to Bangladesh, it's obvious that Bangladesh is offering something to us. And why shouldn't Bangladesh be able to keep its promises? Economically it's full of resources and can stand on its feet. Politically it seems to me led by trained people. The refugees who took shelter here are going home.

Back in August 2013, when Obama entertained the White House press corps in the Rose Garden to explain that he wasn't quite as eager to upbraid Bashar Assad as he might have inadvertently led them earlier to believe, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees counted about two million Syrians in its refugee statistics.

We need to finally be proactive in enlightening people from Islamic cultural groups. And this applies to immigrants already here as well as to current refugees. The German constitution stands above the Sharia. Schools need to offer classes on gender equality. You also have to offer an alternative to young men with a penchant for violence.

I would hope that the future would have an international community that's not just bent on commerce, but that's focused on refugees, of all kinds and from all places. We don't know that won't happen in the U.S. someday. It literally could be a crisis from climate change, or anything. I think there needs to be a global focus on people taking care of people.

We saw that, as Syrian troops went to Aleppo, ISIS took Palmyra. But ISIS' days are numbered. The Donald Trump administration has said that they're going to concentrate on ISIS and they're going to work with Russia. Now, we don't know whether they really will work with Russia or not, but it's clear that ISIS is going to be pounded.

The quota idea is a good one, but there are two problems with it. The first is clear: A quota system would also require all European countries to be prepared to take refugees. And secondly: What happens when the quota has been filled? Would we then simply tell those who are threatened, sorry but we have to send you back?

The whole country saw how unfit [Hillary Clinton] was at the Townhall , where she refused to take accountability for her failed policies in the Middle East that have produced millions of refugees, unleashed horror of radical Islamic terrorism all over, and made us less safe than ever before.

[Hillary Clinton] was saying, "We never going to do anything in Iraq, we're not going to do anything in Syria." Enemies, do whatever you want. Continue the largest humanitarian crisis, 7 million people displaced refugees. Do all this. We're not going to do anything. That is the type of stuff that is been happening for the past 7 1/2 years under President [Barack] Obama.

Making a programme that appears to condone a positive stereotype actually enforces all the negative ones as well. It says that they all have a valid point. To assert that Americans are naive, Germans humourless and the French arrogant is one thing: they're big enough to take it. But to say that there's a conspiracy of Jewish bankers, that gypsies are thieves, Pakistanis are dirty and refugees are muggers is something quite else.

Free migration within Europe means that countries that have done a better job at reducing unemployment will predictably end up with more than their fair share of refugees. Workers in these countries bear the cost in depressed wages and higher unemployment, while employers benefit from cheaper labor.

After Donald Trump`s ban all Muslims proposal, candidate Jeb Bush reacted by calling Mr. Trump unhinged. However, that would be the same Jeb Bush who says we should only allow refugees into this country who are Christians.

I think the President Donald Trump was quite clear in his statement that he made to the American people that Syria's continued violations of U.N. resolutions and previous agreements that Syria had entered into regarding the Chemical Weapons Accord would no longer be tolerated. I think we have stood by and watched multiple weapon - chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian regime under the leadership of Bashar al-Assad.

Some of my good friends who were writers disappeared. Others are still inside Syria and there are others who are refugees. I'm worried about those who disappeared. I don't know anything about them now. They just disappeared like that after the war started, while I was living in the United States.

In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.

In Syria, a no-fly zone targeted at Assad's air force and safe zones for refugees fleeing the fighting would help tamp down the death toll that plays into the hands of ISIS and other Sunni militants who can position themselves as the only groups that are really defending the Sunni population.

A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. There are no Baathists, no one believes this stuff, this is stuff you read in school because it's assigned to you. Maybe someone believed it, but no one really believes it." And I thought that was really interesting to hear, because the ideology of Baathism was presented so often to Americans as the core of what's wrong.

The truth is that people - many people are concerned about this, but this is not the first time in America this has happened. There were a significant number of people who didn`t want Jewish refugees before World War II, or even during World War II.

I started a foundation, called The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The mission has been to help the most vulnerable groups in Afghanistan. So the focus has been on women, children, and homeless refugees, most of whom are in fact women and children.

We're fighting for LGBT rights and for women's rights and for Muslims and for refugees. Well, we shouldn't be fighting for those groups, we should be fighting for freedom and the liberties that are enshrined in our founding documents and that covers everybody: the woman's right to choose, the ability to be able to pursue happiness.

We must go back and we must be sure that our immigrants will be well-integrated into our society, and the best way to do that is to have more economic immigrants, less refugees a little bit and less reunufication of families.

Many people, they flee not the war itself, but the consequences of the war, because they want to live, they want to have the basic needs for their livelihood, they don't have it. They have to flee these circumstances, not necessarily the security situation itself. So, you have different reasons for the people or the refugees to leave Syria.

If they wanted to end the violence and war between them and if they wanted Jews and Palestinians to live in peace, Jews and Palestinians, then they should consider this solution: one democratic state, free from weapons of mass destruction, and with the return of the Palestinian refugees.

Our country's history is a generation-spanning journey to effectuate the notion that 'all men are created equal' for the members of our ever-expanding national family: women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, gays and lesbians, the disabled, immigrants, and refugees.

We're all interconnected. For example, a simple lack of fresh water can lead to population dislocation, which can lead to political radicalization, which can lead to great pressure on the states that receive refugees because of a migrating population.

After I graduated in Vancouver, I had been working on a book about war-affected children and land mines with the foreign minister - he was working at a place on campus and hired me. I then got a job as a Human Rights and Refugees Officer in London, and I loved working there.

[Pope Francis] has done this not through angry speeches, but through the powerful symbols and examples of embracing a badly deformed man, welcoming refugees to the Vatican, strolling through a shanty town in Rome, visiting a home for the elderly, washing the feet of prisoners on Holy Thursday, and going to a hospital for newborns.

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.

I don't even blame pseudo-refugees for trying to have a better life in Holland. I blame our government for allowing it to happen; for not saying 'enough is enough you are not a refugee', we have to defend our own country and close our borders.

In the beginning [of my career] I definitely felt a responsibility because I was representing a bunch of people [Sri lankans] who never got represented before. I felt this responsibility to correct that situation, to be like, "Look, you can't discriminate against refugees and Muslim people and blah, blah, blah . . ."

When people go to a new country, whether as refugees or immigrants, kids usually assimilate easily, but it's much harder for the grownups. Especially, oftentimes, for the mothers, because they are usually confined to the house. They're not going to school, and they're not necessarily holding down a job. It's tough. It's not easy to assimilate to a new culture when you're an adult.

While starving refugees in Homs were providing target practice for government snipers, Bashar al-Assad's strongest international backer was in Sochi, at the Iceberg Skating Palace, visibly moved, smiling with deep satisfaction, as the Russians beautifully glided and leaped their way to the gold medal in the team event.

Since it was there, Larkin got another bowl, spooned up stew for himself. “He fights with us. We’re an army.” “An army? Talk about delusions of grandeur. What are you?” she asked Glenna. “Witch.” “So, we’ve got a witch, a sorcerer, a couple of refugees from Geall and a vampire. Some army.

I'm concerned, too, about ISIS' ability, right, to infiltrate people. But we have got some very effective, robust processes for vetting people. We brought in thousands of Iraqi refugees after the Iraq War. Not a single one has ever turned out to be a terrorist because the vetting was so good.

People have been fed misinformation. The fact is that the fighting that is going on on the ground in Syria is with Al Qaeda, with Jabhat al Nusra, with Daesh. The pockets, small pockets, of other groups are usually surrounded by these various extremist groups. . . . Once they stop fighting, there is nothing for the Syrian government to hit other than the terrorist organizations.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

Our laws were not designed to accommodate three or four thousand refugees coming here per day. Our laws were designed for people to be screened in a foreign country, carefully catalogued, and brought here a few at a time. This just didn't happen.

Because I was in psychiatric treatment for most of my childhood and had to learn English and had to adjust to a white-dominated society, I truly know what being Sudanese refugees [adopting by white family] mean. It's not something that you can explain in the confines of an interview, but there is an immediate comfort, a connection between black phenotypes that is natural.

There's the reason that I think that red states don't trust the government. They see it as an instrument of their own marginalization, because they feel especially Democratic administrations have favored blacks, women, immigrants, refugees. And all of these groups, they see as getting ahead of them, as almost like line-cutters, pushing them back in line.

In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants.

I'm not particularly optimistic, but I hope that the lack of alternatives will lead to it. I would like to remind you of the fact that before May 2015 there was no overall European agenda on immigration. Nothing, zero. It wasn't until after yet another tragedy in the Mediterranean that, in response to an Italian initiative, (Europe) began thinking about setting policies for the registration of refugees, their distribution or their deportation.

Although the history of dispossession and exile for Jews is very different from the history of dispossession and exile for Palestinians, they both have recent and searing experiences which might allow them to come to a common understanding on the rights of refugees, or what it might mean to live together with resonant histories of that kind.

Reading about people who were so truly voiceless and powerless - Liberian child soldiers, Sudanese refugees, and, especially, Kashmiri women whose husbands or sons were imprisoned by the army with no hope of release - made me think about how I would feel if someone took my brothers from me.

Angela [Merkel] and I also agreed the need for a comprehensive and humane response to the devastating humanitarian crisis in Syria and for the influx of migrants and refugees from around the world. We need to build on the progress achieved at the U.N. Refugee Summit, which yielded new commitments from some 50 nations and organizations.

At (UNHCR's) headquarters, I met extraordinary people, men and women, especially from the emergency team, who shared with me their passion, their dedication and their commitment to this organisation and refugees. They told me about the daily difficulties they have to face and also the joy they felt when they managed to save a person whose life was threatened.

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

Berta Caceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of standing up for disenfranchised people.

We consider ISIS and extremism to be a threat to all of us in the region. . . . Our position is that we help the legitimate governments in the region that have representation in the United Nations. We help the Iraqi government on their request through advisers; we help the Syrian government on their request to help with advisers to fight extremists. . . . So it's both lawful and legitimate.

At any rate, those problems [ non-proliferation regime for weapons of mass destruction ] would not be so acute, with numerous terror attacks and victims of those attacks in many areas of the world - in Europe and in the United States. We also never would have had such an urgent problem with refugees, I have no doubt about it.

Two years and a half and Syria is still withstanding against the United States, the West, Saudi Arabia, the richest countries in this area, including Turkey, and, taking into consideration what your question implies, that even the big part or the bigger part of the Syrian population is against me, how can I withstand till today ? Am I the superhuman or Superman, which is not the case !

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.

I don't want to be the only one speaking up for the refugees. I get all these comments from people saying, 'Thanks so much for your courage,' and, 'You're the only one who's spoken out.' But I don't want to be the only one speaking up.

Here is an example: while resolving current issues, our American colleagues made a proposal on the Syrian settlement but then suddenly declared at the UN that they were not going to discuss anything with us. It is necessary to understand what people want in one department versus another department of the United States. Do they have a common position? And this happened many times on very many areas of our cooperation.

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.

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

We understand what President Trump means when he talks about taking the country back. He does not see America as a country of people from diverse backgrounds united around values of freedom and respect. In his 'American carnage' version of our country, immigrants and refugees are a threat.

Obama and his Democrat allies in Congress have proven they will use bait-and-switch tactics to move more unvetted refugees into our communities. This will inevitably put our nation and our citizens at risk for future terrorist attacks.

The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.

Donald Trump has called for extreme vetting for people coming into this country so that we don't bring people into the United States who are hostile to our bill of rights freedoms, who are hostile to the American way of life, but I will say, Donald Trump and I are committed to suspending the Syrian refugee program and programs on immigration from areas of the world that have been compromised by terrorism.

[Vladimir] Putin wants to keep [Bashar] Assad in power and expand his own military base in Syria, whatever the cost. I even believe he has an interest in more and more people fleeing the country. The flow of refugees improves his negotiating position toward the West, including the German chancellor.