Human Atrocity Quotes

“Survivors of atrocity of every age and every culture come to a point in their testimony where all questions are reduced to one, spoken more in bewilderment than in outrage: Why? The answer is beyond human understanding.”

— Judith Lewis Herman

“There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.”

— Chris Hedges

“Each human must invent human love, a chance that will be given to you in becoming human. And for all the atrocity they have done and will do, it is still through human love, and no other, that appetite, desire, and pleasure themselves become the source of ethics, which knowledge makes inseparable from love”

— Patricia Storace

“I have a yearning for my beautiful country, and I love its people because of their misery. But if my people rose, simulated by plunder and motivated by what they call "patriotic spirit" to murder, and invaded my neighbour's country, then upon the committing of any human atrocity I would hate my people and my country.”

— Kahlil Gibran

“It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race-scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley.”

— Philip Roth

“In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator ...”

— J.G. Ballard

“We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.”

— Roxane Gay

“As a physician, I know that human life begins with fertilization, and I remain committed to ending abortion in all stages of pregnancy. I will continue to fight this atrocity on behalf of the unborn, and I hope my colleagues will support me in doing so.”

— Paul Broun

“Is slavery - owner, victim, profit, and domination - exclusive to the human race? Have blacks, Jews, women and children been the only victims of this atrocity? Have not cows been enslaved? What about pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, sheep? If they're not enslaved, then what are they? Free?”

— Gary Yourofsky

“Every apartment devoted to the circulation of the glass, may be regarded as a temple set apart for the performance of human sacrifices. And they ought to be fitted up like the ancient temples in Egypt, in a manner to show the real atrocity of the superstition that is carried on within their walls.”

— Thomas Lovell Beddoes

“After all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray.”

— Jacqueline Novogratz

“The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.”

— Steven Pinker

“All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention - of barbarian invention - is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition - then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity.”

— Robert Green Ingersoll