Political Quotes

“I am pleased to join with some of my colleagues who have been here today to commemorate the Armenian genocide. This observance takes place every April, for it was in that month in 1915 that more than 200 Armenian religious, political and intellectual leaders were arrested in Constantinople and murdered. Over the next 8 years persecution of Armenians intensified. By 1923 more than 1.5 million had died and another 500,000 had gone into exile. At the end of 1923, all of the Armenian residents of Anatolia and western Armenia had been either killed or deported. The genocide was criticized at the time by U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who accused the Turkish authorities of, quote, giving the death warrant to a whole race, unquote. The founder of the modern Turkish Nation, Kemal Ataturk, condemned the crimes perpetrated by his predecessors, and yet this forthright and sober analysis has been spurned by Turkey and the United States during the last decade. The intransigence of this and prior administrations to recognizing and commemorating the Armenian Genocide demonstrates our continued difficulty in reconciling the lessons of history with real politic policies; that is, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. We have seen continually in this century the abject failure to learn and apply this basic principle.”