Quotes / Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide"

Q: How do you make Turkish coffee?
A: Grind up a million Armenian coffee beans and then lie about it for 100 years.

—Russian joke

Ranba Ral: We're going to murder the citizens and drop the colony?!
Dozle Zabi: Shh! Don't say that word. It makes it sound like we're doing something bad.

—Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin (Anime adaptation, Episode 5)

"Annihilate is much too harsh. The world will just be a bit... eh... ravaged?"

—Qilby, Wakfu

Oh, Imu Sama, the light that needs to be extinguished from history, have you decided who it should be yet?

—The Five Elder Stars, One Piece

Arthur Krebs: I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of this.
Xavier March: Of course you knew! You knew every time someone made a joke about ‘going East,’ every time you heard a mother tell her children to behave or they’d go up the chimney. We knew when we moved into their houses, when we took over their property, their jobs. We knew, but we didn’t have the facts. [He pointed to the notes with his left hand.] Those put flesh on the bones. Put bones where there was just clear air.

— Fatherland

One of the reasons for our failure in Rwanda was that beforehand we did not face the fact that genocide was a real possibility. And once it started, for too long we could not bring ourselves to recognize it, or call it by that name.

—Kofi Annan

All Canadian-Americans are required to report to one of these death camps right away. Did I say death camps? I meant happy camps!

—"The March of War" narrator, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

Ah, enjoyable, yes? It's a delicacy from a distant world, light-years away from here. It was very much like Etheria. This dish is incredibly rare, as that world no longer exists.

—Horde Prime to Glimmer about the food she's eating, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, "Horde Prime"

Some may question my right to destroy a world of ten billion souls... but those who truly understand realize that I have no right to let them live. No sacrifice is too great. No treachery too small.

—Unnamed Inquisitor, Warhammer 40,000

Well, I think this is a first. I don't know anyone else who can claim to have committed genocide strictly as an act of immediate self-defense...

—Chuck Sonnenburg upon completing a quest in Dragon Age II that involves fighting a whole village of hostile Dalish Elves out for the player's blood to the death

"I noticed that some Serbs are afraid to be labeled as a genocidal people if they admit there was genocide in Srebrenica."

—Ivan Pernar, Croatian activist & conspiracy theorist on the reasoning behind Srebrenica genocide denial

Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.

—Attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, on Holocaust denial

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit [to Gotha] deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”''

—As Eisenhower actually said (or possibly, General George Marshall to Eisenhower)

"Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It's as simple as that. The CIA doesn't kill anybody anymore, they neutralize people, or they depopulate the area. The government doesn't lie, it engages in disinformation."

—George Carlin, Doin' It Again / Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics

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