Quotations

“I am not here today because I like the Africans and not because I have any connection to them, but because I know the feeling of being hungry and homeless.”

“We, the Jewish people, who suffered from persecution and from the world’s disregard to our fate, arrived to our land as refugees. We must not ignore the suffering and distress of other people.”

“I think the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust wasn’t just the loss of six million Jewish lives, lives of my own sisters, father and many other family members. It was that the lessons of the Holocaust weren’t learned. That there have been many genocides since then. I think that’s the real tragedy. The world said ‘never again,’ but instead of that, again and again, we see these atrocities against innocent people. That’s really the sad part.”

"I remember running from one place to the other and basically being a refugee myself, so my sympathy really goes with refugees, and I do not wish to confine that sympathy to my people alone. We've been refugees ourselves, because we in the '30s and '40s found all the gates closed in front of us. When you see the scene of what has happened at the train station in Budapest, you can't forget the trains that led the Jews to their deaths, and I think that if there is one thing that we have to learn - or that many of us have learned from the Holocaust - is the sanctity of human life."

“No one takes their child on a flimsy boat to cross the Mediterranean unless they are desperate.”

"The Republic of Cuba has the right to select the quality of immigrants most suited to the development of the population, its industries and commerce, classifying each immigrant as useful or not useful to our nationality.”

"We hear a lot about the asylum seekers and refugees, but we do not listen to them enough. It is more difficult to hate, fear or expel a person if you look into his eyes and listen to his story, even briefly.”

“Being a refugee is not a choice one makes!”

"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."

"If you can't imagine yourself in one of those boats, you have something missing. They are dying for a life worth living. #refugeeswelcome"

"The key to the problem of immigration must be the contribution which the immigrants can make to the development of the population, to wealth and the cultural life of the countries to which they emigrate.”

“At stake at Evian were both human lives – and the decency and self-respect of the civilized world. If each nation at Evian had agreed on that day to take in 17,000 Jews at once, every Jew in the Reich could have been saved. […] At Evian, they began with high hopes. But they failed the test of civilization. The civilized world hid in a cloak of legalisms.”

“When we look at the face of each refugee, but especially those of the children and women, we feel their suffering, and a human being who has a better situation in life has the responsibility to help them. But on the other hand, there are too many at the moment…”

“All nations probably, and this country included, could absorb a far greater number of individual refugees than they do now without suffering from economic or political indigestion.”

"The most widespread and serious opposition to immigration is based on the argument that the labour (sic!) market is already overstocked and that any addition will merely aggravate the problem of unemployment. The prevalence of unemployment is used as an argument for encouraging emigration and discouraging immigration.”

„Misfortune is just as stigmatizing as leprosy – for a little while, it causes sympathy, then unpatience and in the end rejection and antipathy. People always tend to claim their own distress to be a virtue, while declaring the others’ distress to be a crime.”

"Refugees are the very embodiment of ‚human waste‘, with no useful function to play in the land of their arrival and temporary stay, and with neither an intention nor a realistic prospect that they will be assimilated and incorporated into the new social body.”

"No society, no state, can successfully assume the tremendous responsibility of fostering thousands of motherless, embittered, persecuted children of undesirable foreigners and expect to convert these embattled souls into loyal, loving American citizens... If these so-called innocent, helpless children are admitted as refugees into America, I am sure they will become the leaders of revolt and deprive my children of their right to worship God, of free speech, and of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."