Quotes about amnesty

A collection of quotes on the topic of amnesty, people, governance, government.

Quotes about amnesty

“What was a reasonable offer? In the first place, there ought to be an amnesty. … The second point in the terms should be a grant of money to rebuild the burned homesteads and restock the devastated farms. … Nothing would do more to accelerate the return of peace and order than to give the people occupation and a chance of living. Then, it should be part of any reasonable offer to the Boers that there should be a speedy restoration of self-governing institutions.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Speech to the Women's National Liberal Association Conference, Memorial Hall, London (12 June 1901), quoted in The Times (13 June 1901), p. 12.
1900s

Money, People, Peace, Chance

“I am writing to you to tell you of my decision to return to your Government the Carl von Ossietzsky medal for peace. I do so reluctantly and after two years of private approaches on behalf of Heinz Brandt, whose continued imprisonment is a barrier to coexistence, relaxation of tension and understanding between East and West… I regret not to have heard from you on this subject. I hope that you will yet find it possible to release Brandt through an amnesty which would be a boon to the cause of peace and to your country.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Walter Ulbricht, January 7, 1964. Russell would later write, in his autobiography: "The abduction and imprisonment by the East Germans of Brandt, who had survived Hitler's concentration camps, seemed to me so inhuman that I was obliged to return to the East German Government the Carl von Ossietzky medal which it had awarded me. I was impressed by the speed with which Brandt was soon released".
1960s

Peace, Hope, Understanding, Decision

“Amnesty, n. The state’s magnaminity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“When politicians talk about immigration reform, they usually mean the following: amnesty, open borders, and lower wages. Immigration reform should mean something else entirely: it should mean improvements to our laws and policies to make life better for American citizens. But if we are going to make our immigration system work, then we have to be prepared to talk honestly and without fear about these important and sensitive issues.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Immigration speech (31 August 2016)
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-immigration-address-transcript-227614

Life, Fear, Law

“The sections of the Bill dealing with amnesty were not plucked out of thin air. They have been taken from legislation adopted and successfully used elsewhere. The principles of amnesty are well known and accepted internationally. We have done the research on this.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

14 June 2005
Additional remarks about the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission

“We are a nation of laws and we must enforce our immigration laws. This is one way we uphold our greatest responsibility of providing for the common defense. It is in the best interest of the citizens of the United States and our homeland security that we ensure that all those wishing to come and stay in our nation not only contribute in a positive way to our American society, but also come here in the proper and legal way. Amnesty should never be the answer. As Congress moves forward with responsible immigration reform, I will work to ensure any actions are made in the best interest of American families, tax payers, and those seeking to come to America through proper, legal channels.”

Buddy Carter (1957) State Senator

Carter: President Trump Made Right Move on DACA https://buddycarter.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=2350 (September 5, 2017)

Family, Law, Way

“The creation of a legal eligibility allowing the grant of an amnesty for treason is abhorrent and unacceptable. The Bill was supposed to be a search for the truth behind the tragedy of 2000, but the Bill never once mentions the word "truth."”

Graeme Leung Fijian lawyer

16 June 2005 parliamentary submission

Truth, Search

“We're always told that we need to amnesty illegals to shore up Social Security. How, exactly, are people who make so little money that they don't pay income taxes going to save Social Security?”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2015, Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (2015)

Money, People

“Personally, I feel that if the Lau Provincial Council votes for this Bill it means that they are supporting the amnesty clause, which is what the whole Bill is about. Do they understand that what they are actually doing is agreeing in principle to the removal of the late Turaga na Tui Nayau and condoning the coup perpetrators who were the very thugs who removed the Tui Nayau and brought anarchy to Fiji in the year 2000.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

On the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, 24 July, 2005

Feeling, Understanding, Support, Personality

“I don't think there's a quick fix to this. I don't think there's any simple way to deal with this. And I will not support amnesty for anybody, I mean, that would be rewarding bad behavior.”

Jim Clyburn (1940) American politician

[31 May 2007, http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=66087, "Clyburn Won't Support Amnesty in Immigration Legislation", Associated Press, 2007-07-24]

Way, Behavior, Support, Thinking

“This nation made a mistake the first time it granted amnesty to the perpetrators of the 1987 coup. The trust and confidence we showed then was sadly displaced. This time around, we must take a hard line attitude to those who think they can overthrow a democratically-elected government with impunity. We have to stamp out this coup-culture that has developed in Fiji.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

20 May 2005
Opposition to the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission

Confidence, Thinking, Time

“Like the major US- and European-based human rights organisations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and following the line taken up by white western women's organisations and publications, the Gay International was to reserve a special place for the Muslim countries in its discourse as well as its advocacy. The orientalist impulse … continues to guide all branches of the human rights community.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid., p. 161.
Desiring Arabs

Women, Communication, Country

“(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Bandits (Penguin, 1985), p. 25.

Men, Hope, Past

“It's time for America to recapture its destiny. Our government, our leaders, and our media have lost touch with the people. You need no better evidence of that than the fact that the media ignores the plight of Americans who have lost their children to illegal immigrants, but spends day after day pushing for amnesty for those here in violation of the law.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, August, Speech in Jackson, Mississippi (August 24, 2016)

Children, People, Law, Time

“I do not support a blanket amnesty policy for our country. I believe it would dishonor legal immigrants who came here the right way, and it would only encourage more illegal migration”

Tom Kean, Jr. (1968) Member of the New Jersey General Assembly and State Senate

Speech at Liberty State Park (May 17, 2006); "Amnesty Statement", Tom's Blog" (May 17, 2006) http://tomkean.com/today/index.cfm?e=user.about.blog&messageID=139.

Way, Support, Country

“I am old enough to remember when there was no Amnesty International. I am also old enough to remember a Cuba before Fidel Castro. Indeed, my seemingly simple life trajectory dramatically changed course right as the two were coming into existence. In 1960, at the age of 23, I was taken away at gunpoint in the night for refusing to place a sign on my desk that read, “I’m with Fidel.” One year later, Amnesty International was founded, and I became one of their first prisoners of conscience.”

Armando Valladares (1937) American diplomat and former Cuban prisoner

Armando Valladares. " Against All Hope: My 22 Years In Castro’s Gulags http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armando-valladares-/against-all-hope-my-22-ye_b_9933328.html," at huffingtonpost.com 05/13/2016.

Life, Age, Change, Reading

“Forty years on, Amnesty International has secured many victories. Its files are full of letters from former prisoners of conscience or torture victims thanking the organisation for making a difference. Torture is now banned by international agreement. Every year more countries reject the death penalty. The world will soon have an International Criminal Court that will be able to ensure that those accused of the worst crimes in the world will face justice. The Court's very existence will deter some crimes.
But the challenges are still great. Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or "disappearance" to be carried out by their officials with impunity.
Those who today still feel a sense of impotence can do something: they can support Amnesty International. They can help it to stand up for freedom and justice.”

Peter Benenson (1921–2005) English human rights activist

Source: Amnesty International (2002) The Amnesty International Report. p. 22

Death, Secret, World, Justice

“Every American should take note of those candidates who stand with the economic interests of America’s citizens, and who stand with the Rule of Law, by rejecting Amnesty in all its forms. It is wrong when Democrats seek to demean the intrinsic value of American citizenship by importing the Third World to replace the millions of voters their redistributionist policies and racial grievance politics have driven away. It is also wrong when Republican leadership conveniently chooses to waive the application of the law to guarantee a supply of unskilled and low-cost workers for their corporate benefactors.”

Steve King (1949) US Representative for Iowa

Rep. Steve King: ‘DACA’ – ‘Delivering Amnesty to Central Americans’ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/09/26/exclusive-rep-steve-king-daca-delivering-amnesty-central-americans/ (September 26, 2017)

World, Law

“(1) Every year, in this nation of more than a quarter billion individuals, a few thousand (three quarters of them suicides) are killed with firearms, while millions of Americans successfully use personal weapons to save themselves and others from injury or death. Guns save many, many times more lives than they take.
(2) In every jurisdiction that has made it even microscopically easier for individuals to carry weapons, violent crime rates have plummeted by double-digit percentages. Vermont, where no permission of any kind is required to carry a gun, is named in many respectable surveys as the safest state to live in.
(3) More telling and urgent, every episode of genocidal mass murder in history has been preceded by a period of intense disarming of the civil population, usually with 'public safety' or 'national security' as an excuse. According to Amnesty International — hardly a gang of right wing crazies — in the 20th century alone (in events entirely separate from war), governments have slaughtered more than a hundred million people, usually their own citizens.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Murder by Gun Control" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2000/libe68-20000331-07.html 31 March 2000.

Death, War, People, History

“The amnesty period from May 2000 to March was the very period in which the late President was removed.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

On the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, 24 July, 2005

“In Iran, no-one can ignore the tragic record of the revolution. Over the past three decades some six million Iranians have fled their homeland. The Iran-Iraq war claimed almost a million lives on both sides. During the first four years of the Khomeinist regime alone 22,000 people were executed, according to Amnesty International. Since then, the number of executions has topped 80,000. More than five million people have spent some time in prison, often on trumped-up charges. In terms of purchasing power parity, the average Iranian today is poorer than he was before the revolution. De-Khomeinization does not mean holding the late ayatollah solely responsible for all that Iran has suffered just as Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, and Fidel Castro shared the blame with others in their respective countries. However, there is ample evidence that Khomeini was the principal source of the key decisions that led to tragedy… Memoirs and interviews and articles by dozens of Khomeini’s former associates—including former Presidents Abol-Hassan Banisadr and Hashemi Rafsanjani and former Premier Mehdi Bazargan—make it clear that he was personally responsible for some of the new regime’s worst excesses. These include the disbanding of the national army, the repression of the traditional Shi’ite clergy, and the creation of an atmosphere of terror, with targeted assassinations at home and abroad. Khomeini has become a symbol of what went wrong with Iran’s wayward revolution. De-Khomeinization might not spell the end of Iran’s miseries just as de-Stalinization and de-Maoization initially produced only minimal results. However, no nation can plan its future without coming to terms with its past.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Opinion: Iran must confront its past to move forwards" http://www.aawsat.net/2015/02/article55341173, Ashraq Al-Awsat (February 6, 2015).

War, People, Home, Decision

“It is always easy to blame the state and the men in uniform. But Islamic terror essentially does not emanate from uniforms and state power, but from a belief system which even the ordinary people have been fed. That is why a lot of Islamic terror never gets recorded by human-rights organizations like Amnesty International. A Christian Pakistani friend complained to me that Amnesty had not spoken out against the religious persecutions in his homeland, even when these are a grim and undeniable reality. The fact is that much of this persecution and discrimination is not ordered by the state (the type of culprit with which Amnesty is familiar), but is a spontaneous attitude among sections of the Muslim population, egged on by nothing except the omnipresent Islamic doctrine.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

Men, People, Reality

“In what a delightful communion with God does that man live who habitually seeketh love! With the same mantle thrown over him from the cross — with the same act of amnesty, by which we hope to be saved — injuries the most provoked, and transgressions the most aggravated, are covered in eternal forgetfulness.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 252.

Love, God, Hope, Forgetting

“The President of the United States is not a king and does not rule from a castle. This ruling affirms what every branch of government, including the president himself, has said - the president's backdoor attempt at granting amnesty to illegal immigrants is unconstitutional. I hope this serves as a wake up call and reminder to this administration that this is America and the people, through their elected representatives, will make the decisions in this nation. There is no room for executive fiat and it will not stand.”

Buddy Carter (1957) State Senator

Carter Statement on United States v. Texas Decisio https://buddycarter.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1089 (June 23, 2016)

People, Hope, Decision

“The Government's determination to push through the controversial Amnesty Bill has created deep divisions in the nation, and leaves behind indelible impressions of an administration that backs lawless elements in society.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

New Year message, 22 December 2005 (excerpts)

“We must face the reality that millions of illegal immigrants are already here. They should not be given an automatic path to citizenship; that is amnesty. I oppose amnesty. There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic pass to citizenship for every illegal immigrant and a program of mass deportation. And I look forward to working with Congress to find that middle ground.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2004, Signing of Secure Fence Act of 2006

Reality

“Those who follow orders to commit such crimes will be found and they will be punished. War crimes will be prosecuted. And it will be no excuse to say, 'I was just following orders.' Any official involved in such crimes will forfeit hope of amnesty or leniency with respect to past action.”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

Pentagon briefing, March 20, 2003 http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2072 <br class="br">2000s

War, Hope, Past

“Obama violated not just democratic norms but also his constitutional oath by effectively granting amnesty to millions of immigrants in the country illegally despite having insisted that he did not have the power to do so.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Breaking democratic norms was rampant before the anonymous op-ed. Now it's a free-for-all (2018)

Country

“If anyone believes that the enforcement of laws will be stopped if I am done away with, that they are more than wrong, because I am not the system. The system will keep on functioning and no one will get amnesty by getting one or two state officials out of the way.”

Zoran Đinđić (1952–2003) Serbian politician

Politika, 20.02.2003.

Law, Way

“For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.Then you go to an anti-immigration website chat room and ask, "What's all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?"”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

Quoted in "Punk the prez? Moby's anti-Bush tricks" by George Rush and Joanna Rush Molloy, New York Daily News (9 February 2004); for Moby's comment on this news item, see "today's daily news", journal entry (8 February 2004) at moby.com http://www.moby.com/journal/2004-02-09/todays_daily_news.html

Life

“As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Statement about Americans who avoided the draft during the Vietnam War, to Veterans of Foreign Wars, Chicago, Illinois (19 August 1974)
1970s

Forgiveness, Revenge, Past

“if you pass amnesty, that's it. It's over. Then we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

to Republicans who support immigration reform * 2014-03-08
2014 Conservative Political Action Conference
CSPAN
TV
http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/05/27/immigrants-are-more-dangerous-than-isis-and-10/203769
2014

Death, People

“Maybe we could fight the war a little harder and not keep responding to Amnesty International… I don't think we even need more troops. I think we need to be less worried about civilian casualties. I mean, are the terrorists—are Islamic terrorists a more frightening enemy than the Nazis war machine? I don't think so. Fanatics can be stopped. Japanese kamikaze bombers—you can stop them by bombing their society. We killed more people in two nights over Hamburg than we have in the entire course of the Iraq war. … You can destroy the fighting spirit of fanatics. We've done it before. We know how to do it. And it's not by fighting a clean little hygienic war. … That was not a clean, hygienic war, World War Two. We killed a lot of civilians, and we crushed the Nazi war machine. And the idea that Nazism, which was tied to a civilized culture, was less of a threat than the Koran, tied to a Stone Age culture, I think is preposterous! If we want to win this war, we absolutely could. And I think we've been too nice so far. … We have liberals in this country screaming bloody murder about how we treat terrorists captured who are at Guantanamo, whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is being water-boarded… If this is a country that is worried about that—and I don't think it is—then we may as well give up right now. … Democracies don't like to go to war, so we're going to have to wrap it up quickly and destroy the fighting spirit of the fanatics.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Hardball with Chris Matthews (26 June 2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60xDmowdTCA <br class="br">2007

War, People, Age, World

“In trying to work for you, we might have failed to take good care of your souls as expected. We ask for your forgiveness in this Year of Mercy. We ask a bit a bit of amnesty from you. We should humbly acknowledge before God and his people the fact that in the history of our priesthood, the dark presence of sin is also found, so there is the need for us in this Year of Mercy to commit ourselves fully to the search for holiness.”

Robert Ndlovu (1955) Archbishop of Harare

Source: Archbishop of Harare celebrates Chrism Mass http://www.archivioradiovaticana.va/storico/2016/03/24/archbishop_of_harare_celebrates_chrism_mass/en-1217797 (24 March 2016)

Soul, God, History, Search