Afghanistan Refugees Quotes

Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach the Safety in Europe in 2015.

In the year after Alan's death, 4,176 others died or went missing attempting that same journey. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The women in that ward were simple, ordinary refugee women. They came from villages or very small towns. Even before becoming refugees, they had been poor. They had no education. They had no notion of an outside world where life might be different. They were being treated for various ailments, but in the end, their gender was their ailment.

In the first bed, a skinny fourteen-year-old girl lay rolled into her sheets in a state of almost catatonic unresponsiveness, eyes closed, not speaking even in reply to the doctor's gentle greeting. Her family had brought her to be treated for mental illness, the doctor explained with regret. They had recently married her to a man in his seventies, a wealthy and influential personage by their standards. In their version of things, something had started mysteriously to go wrong with her mind as soon as the marriage was agreed upon – a case of demon possession, her family supposed. When, after repeated beatings, she still failed to cooperate gracefully with her new husband's sexual demands, he had angrily returned her to her family and ordered them to fix this problem.

They had taken the girl to a mullah, who had tried to expel the demon through prayers and by writing Quranic passages on little pieces of paper that had to be dissolved in water and then drunk, but this had brought no improvement, so the mullah had abandoned his diagnosis of demon possession and decided that the girl was sick. The family had brought her t ~ Cheryl Benard

I said to you,
"Hold my hand.
Nothing bad will happen."

These are only words.
A father's tricks,
It slays your father,
your faith in him.
Because all I can think tonight is
how deep the sea,
and how vast, how indifferent.
How powerless I am to protect you from it.

All I can do is pray. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees. ~ Malala Yousafzai

Christians should put survival of the planet ahead of national security...Here is the mystery of our global responsibility: that we are in communion with Christ- and we are in communion with all people...The fact that the people of Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Russia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia are our brothers and sisters is not obvious. People kill each other by the thousands and do not see themselves as brothers and sisters. If we want to be real peace-makers, national security cannot be our primary concern. Our primary concern should be survival of humanity, the survival of the planet, and the health of all people. Whether we are Russians, Iraqis, Ethiopians, or North Americans, we belong to the same human family that God loves. And we have to start taking some risks- not just individually, but risks of a more global quality, risks to let other people develop their own independence, risks to share our wealth with others and invite refugees to our country, risks to offer sanctuary- because we are people of God ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I pray God that whoever will lead our country may be, in his heart, as much Pashtun as Tajik, as much Uzbek as Hazara. That his wife may counsel and assist him; that he may choose advisors of great character and wisdom. That books may replace weapons, that education may teach us to respect one another, that our hospitals may be worthy of their mission, and that our culture may be reborn from the ruins of our pillaged museums. That the camps of famished refugees may disappear from our borders, and that the bread the hungry eat be kneaded by their own hands.

I will do more than pray, because when the last talib has put away his black turban and I can be a free woman in a free Afghanistan, I will take up my life there once more and do my duty as a citizen, as a woman, and, I hope, as a mother. ~ Latifa

Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles. ~ Maureen Dowd

Afghanistan is a country in need. Afghanistan needs to protect itself in the region; Afghanistan needs to secure itself within the country. Afghanistan needs to develop its forces, and Afghanistan needs to provide stability to the people. ~ Hamid Karzai

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own. ~ Andrei Codrescu

how it is that Israel is capable of absorbing Jewish refugees, hundreds of thousands from Arab lands, and yet Arabs refuse to absorb the Arab refugees from Palestine or allow the land of Transjordan (now called Jordan), taken from the region of Palestine, to be used for these refugees.9 ~ Ann Atkins

In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others. ~ Thomas Harding

Syrian refugees are Trojan horses. ~ Donald Trump

It was not the creation of 760,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees that has created this hatred. It was this hatred that created the refugees. Had six Arab armies not attacked Israel to destroy it in 1948, there would not have been any refugees. ~ Dennis Prager

My record label always says you shouldn't talk about money because it makes people extremely uncomfortable. Refugees can't talk about money. Rappers can talk about money; refugees can't talk about money. ~ M.I.A.

Afghanistan - where empires go to die. ~ Mike Malloy

Los Angeles is a city made up of refugees from better cities. ~ J. Richard Singleton

Afghanistan will be a brother of Pakistan. Afghanistan will never betray a brother ~ Hamid Karzai

And though various organizations in America and England collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was ever received by the Spanish. ~ Martha Gellhorn

We invaded Afghanistan to find bin Laden. We found him in Pakistan, and we're still in Afghanistan. We need better GPS. ~ Andy Borowitz

There is a direct line relationship between what happened in Afghanistan in the work up to 11 September 2001 and what we're doing in Afghanistan today. ~ John R. Allen

Sharon Shinn's Samaria is a world populated by refugees from a ravaged Earth, also many, many years in the future. ~ Alethea Kontis

It is time we accept there's no Cronkite moment for Afghanistan. Perhaps it's time we value the hearts and minds of our own over distant Afghan tribes. ~ Tiffany Madison

At the end of the day, it's not about who the refugees are, or if they are refugees at all. We are not helping "the refugees", we care only about the People behind the label because we are all human beings. We create those borders inside our heads and pretend that we care about where each of us comes from, allowing those borders to limit our way of thinking and living. ~ Ra'ad Ammari

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country. ~ Eric Weiner

There's no place for mob justice in Afghanistan. ~ Ashraf Ghani

Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Ethiopia each take care of millions of refugees, and between them, outweigh the numbers of refugees taken in by all the 50 countries of Europe combined. ~ Onjali Q. Raúf

Refugees are going to continue to come, and the only question is what we are going to do to help them. ~ Davan Yahya Khalil

Referring to Palestinian refugees: We must do everything in our power to ensure that they never return. ~ David Ben-Gurion

Afghanistan changed him, but Iraq sculpted him. ~ Melissa Seligman

Today three-quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced: there are 5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the world. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

It would be very hard to bring a wife to Afghanistan. In America, I'd have no problem with her doing whatever she wanted, but in Afghanistan, that's not the case. ~ Hyder Akbar

We call on the international community to share equitably the responsibility for protecting, assisting and hosting refugees in accordance with principles of international solidarity and human rights. ~ Widad Akreyi

The future of Afghanistan is incredibly dark, and decisions are happening incredibly quickly. ~ Eliza Griswold

Look at the violence in Pakistan and the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan: the more troops we put in the more violent Pakistan becomes. ~ Michael Hastings

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that. ~ Khaled Hosseini

If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later. ~ Rachel Maddow

I would not like to be in President Obama's position in making choices on Afghanistan. ~ Mark Danner

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure. ~ Camille Paglia

We often discuss housing refugees, but not how you help return refugees back to their home countries. As a result, in a post-disaster or post-conflict situation, we end up with intractable refugee camps that end up staying for decades. ~ Cameron Sinclair

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time. ~ Khaled Hosseini

And the last thing that I want to see us do is ask more and more of our troops [in Afghanistan ] without guaranteeing that we're providing more and more of what's necessary to make the mission successful. ~ Rahm Emanuel

I'd play in Afghanistan if they wanted me to! ~ Jason Ryles

We know that much of the training and the direction for terrorists comes from Pakistan and the border area with Afghanistan ~ Hillary Clinton

The ongoing war in Afghanistan is being imposed on us, and Afghans are being sacrificed in it for someone else's interests. We are not blocking the interests of the United States or other major powers. But we are demanding that if you consider Afghanistan the place from which to advance your interests, then you should also pay attention to Afghanistan's interests. ~ Hamid Karzai

We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again. ~ Edwidge Danticat

The solution to the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. ~ Hannah Arendt

As far as the refugees are concerned, it's not that America doesn't want to accept refugees.t's that we may not be able to, because this is an issue we have to be 100 percent right on. If we allow 9,999 Syrian refugees into the United States, and all of them are good people, but we allow one person in who's an ISIS killer - we just get one person wrong, we've got a serious problem. ~ Marco Rubio

Even though the Bush campaign ad tells you that Afghanistan is a new democracy at the Olympics because of Bush's efforts, Afghanistan hasn't actually had an election. ~ Peter Schuyler

Saudi hijackers first came into contact with al-Qaeda and went through Terrorism 101 when they signed up for the jihad in Afghanistan. ~ Thomas Friedman

Afghanistan is the most daring and ambition mission in the history of NATO. ~ George W. Bush

We were not told how Alexander the Great was the last person in history to successfully 'pacify' what would become Afghanistan, over 2,000 years ago. ~ Jake Wood

Every time I visit Iraq or Afghanistan I am blown away. ~ David Cameron

We are also assisting the refugees who have fled across the border to Chad. As many of them have been subject to attacks by militia crossing from Sudan, UNHCR is mounting a major logistical operation to establish camps and transfer refugees away from the border zone. ~ Jan Egeland

I do dream about Afghanistan. I wake up and think I'm still there. ~ Ross Kemp

There's nothing I can do to erase the shadow of misery and despair from the eyes looking back at me from the photos [that I took in Afghanistan]. ~ Vladislav Tamarov

Afghanistan has moved forward and Afghanistan will defend itself. And the progress that we have achieved, the Afghan people will not allow it to be put back or reversed. ~ Hamid Karzai

But in Afghanistan, the general rule was that since you were fighting the Taliban, which was not a lawful government force, the Geneva Conventions did not apply. And that led to a lot of excesses in Afghanistan, excesses like Abu Ghraib that were already well-publicized. ~ Yaroslav Trofimov

The best way to get Americans to focus on what's happening in Afghanistan is by using the example of their own. ~ Tim Hetherington

Weather in Afghanistan, 2000 degrees and cloudy. What the f-ck am I doing? I'm stuck on the weather channel. AHHH! ~ Ozzy Osbourne

Saying he is in Afghanistan in a spirit of brotherhood, we have also vowed that we will not allow each other's countries, ever, to be used against interests of ours. ~ Pervez Musharraf

I'm saying 9/11 was to get us into Iraq and get us into Afghanistan. ~ Jesse Ventura

When an army unit returns from service in Iraq or Afghanistan, it barely gets a breather before it begins training for its next deployment. ~ Hillary Clinton

Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans or Israelis. ~ Jurgen Habermas

Afghanistan is very satisfied with Croatia's participation in the NATO-led peace mission and expects Croatia to expand its contribution to peace restoration in Afghanistan to other areas as well. ~ Hamid Karzai

Afghanistan is a land-locked country. ~ Lakhdar Brahimi

To understand Afghanistan, you have to face the stress the average Afghan deals with. ~ Hyder Akbar

A trillion dollars spent, 2,000 American lives lost - Afghanistan is the longest war in American history. But you don't hear a word about it. ~ Michael Baumgartner

The United States will not be in Afghanistan forever. ~ Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

It is amazing that the refugees stay sane. First the bombs, perhaps the "battle" around them, their casualties, their naked helplessness; then the flight, leaving behind everything they have worked for all their lives; then the semi-starvation and ugly hardship of the camps or the slums; and as a final cruelty, the killing diseases which only strike at them. ~ Martha Gellhorn

They [U.S. soldiers] are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan. ~ Sarah Palin

İf you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness? That is why people do not like us refugees. It is because they only know the tragic parts of our life, so they think we are tragic people. ~ Chris Cleave

Involvement in Afghanistan, I thought, was totally warranted. We were attacked, we attacked back, but after six months of being in Afghanistan, I thought we had pretty well effectively wiped out al Qaeda. ~ Gary Johnson

On the Gang of Eight bill, there was no provisions really for extra scrutiny or safety for refugees. At the time the bill came up, two Iraqi refugees came to my home town, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Their fingerprints were on a bomb from Iraq. They were in the database, but we didn't pick them up. ~ Rand Paul

Now, I know there are many Americans who say, 'Get out of Afghanistan. Bring 'em all home.' And there are others who say, 'Put in hundreds of thousands of more.' ~ Hillary Clinton

A democratically elected congressman of the United States of America should not be talking of an ethnic divide in Afghanistan, should not be interfering in Afghanistan's internal affairs. ~ Hamid Karzai

As we begin to leave Afghanistan, are we fooling ourselves about what we are leaving behind or what we have promised the people of Afghanistan? Especially the women and girls? ~ Greta Van Susteren

Bhutto brought up the coup in Afghanistan, which has resulted in deposing the country's monarchy and replacing it with a republic under a nationalist cousin of the king. Kissinger said he had discussed the matter with the Soviet Ambassador. "I told him if the recent coup in Afghanistan remained an internal Afghan affair, that would be one matter" he said, "but if it resurrected the Pashtunistan dispute, the U.S. would be engaged. This is the basic policy of the president. ~ Husain Haqqani

The best thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai. We should have focused less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends. ~ Craig M. Mullaney

Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses. ~ Keith Henson

I supported the war in Afghanistan because 3000 of our people were murdered and I thought we had a right to defend the people of the United States. ~ Howard Dean

The people of Afghanistan will continue to remember his lasting friendship with the people of Afghanistan as well as his unstinting support during the years of jihad against the Soviets. ~ Hamid Karzai

One of the most troubling aspects of the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight Bill was that it gave President [Barack] Obama blanket authority to admit refugees, including Syrian refugees without mandating any background checks whatsoever. Now we've seen what happened in San Bernardino. When you are letting people in, when the FBI can't vet them, it puts American citizens at risk. ~ Ted Cruz

If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan. ~ Asne Seierstad

The death of American soldiers is as painful as the death of civilians in Afghanistan, and what makes our world a better place is not pouring more guns and weapons in this country, but educating the uneducated population. Since, those guns can ended up in the hands of dangerous group that can take the lives of many poor people in Afghanistan and everywhere else. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

It feels like last week, but in fact we're now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud ... and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11. ~ Tucker Elliot

I decided in '96 to dedicate my life to mostly promoting literacy and education for girls in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. ~ Greg Mortenson

Perhaps we underestimated the challenges in Afghanistan in the past. That's why we are now strengthening and intensifying our commitment. ~ Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval. ~ Khaled Hosseini

While I disagree with our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have nothing but respect and admiration for the men and women deployed in these places. ~ Henry Rollins

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience. ~ Robert M. Gates

If today is anything like the typical day of the past 3 years, three American soldiers will die in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Taliban will get a little stronger in Afghanistan and the civil war will continue to be enhanced in Iraq. ~ Alcee Hastings

Trying to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap has left the country in the hands of warlords and an impotent Northern Alliance puppet regime that runs Kabul and nothing else. ~ Ted Rall

We have been helping, trying to help Afghanistan in many ways, even from the beginning of ... the beginnings of the '20s, 1920s, when he we were fighting our own national struggle. ~ Bulent Ecevit

The United States can't impose democracies. We can't impose our will. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan. ~ Chuck Hagel

The Buddhas had to be destroyed by the Taliban to get the world thinking about Afghanistan. ~ Mohsen Makhmalbaf

The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan - the one you'll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars - was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: 'The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control'. ~ Anand Gopal

People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy. ~ David Chase

Gen. Tommy Franks told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq - a war more than a year away. ~ Bob Graham

People get upset when Baghdad, the "Cradle of Civilization" is burning, or when the Buddhas in Afghanistan are falling. These are real concerns. ~ Aleksandra Mir