Political Quotes

“I rise today to recall and to honor the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman government between 1915 and 1923. Genocides claimed the lives of some 60 million people in the century just past, 16 million after the end of the Second World War, when we told ourselves, ``Never again.'' The Armenian Genocide was the 20th century's first genocide, a vicious, organized crime against humanity that included murder, deportation, torture, and slave labor. Some would ignore the Armenian victims and forget how they died. We need to fight against such forgetfulness. An Armenian named Vahram Dadrian was a survivor of the genocide and wrote about his experiences in a moving memoir. But by the 1940s, he had begun to lose hope. ``Everything has been forgotten,'' he wrote, ``our . . . dead could never have imagined, even for a fraction of a moment, that they would have been forgotten so soon.'' We must restore that lost hope. We must not forget. To do so would dishonor the memories of the dead and send a message to the world that we might tolerate genocide. We will not tolerate the intolerable. We will remember, and in doing so, cultivate the knowledge--and the wisdom--necessary to act to prevent a repetition of these terrible crimes. Because the problem isn't simply a matter of knowing, but about knowing when and how to act. Senator Ensign and I have submitted a resolution that acknowledges the suffering of those destroyed by the Armenian genocide.…”