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Top 20 Philip Gourevitch Quotes (2025 Update)

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”

1. “Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.”

2. “What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”

3. “The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality – even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.”

4. “So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality – even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.”

5. “Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.”

6. “Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.”

7. “This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building... In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously admistered states in history.”

8. “Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building... In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously admistered states in history.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together.”

9. “Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island’s flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci – a paragon of charisma and corruption.”

10. “Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island’s flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci – a paragon of charisma and corruption.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Political corruption is to Rhode Islanders as smog is to people who live in Los Angeles: nobody complains of its absence, but when it rolls around everyone feels right at home.”

11. “Political corruption is to Rhode Islanders as smog is to people who live in Los Angeles: nobody complains of its absence, but when it rolls around everyone feels right at home.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Hutu power had presided over one of the most outrageous crimes in a century of seemingly relentless mass political murder, and the only way to get away with it was to continue to play the victim.”

12. “Hutu power had presided over one of the most outrageous crimes in a century of seemingly relentless mass political murder, and the only way to get away with it was to continue to play the victim.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “I’d like to talk to him,” Edmond said. “I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving sister said, ‘Let’s denounce him.’ I saw what was happening – a wave of arrests all at once – and I said, ‘What good is prison, if he doesn’t feel what I feel? Let him live in fear.’ When the time is right, I want to make him understand that I’m not asking for his arrest, but for him to live forever with what he has done.”

13. “I’d like to talk to him,” Edmond said. “I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving sister said, ‘Let’s denounce him.’ I saw what was happening – a wave of arrests all at once – and I said, ‘What good is prison, if he doesn’t feel what I feel? Let him live in fear.’ When the time is right, I want to make him understand that I’m not asking for his arrest, but for him to live forever with what he has done.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “The spectre of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual – always an annoyance to totality – ceases to exist.”

14. “The spectre of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual – always an annoyance to totality – ceases to exist.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “In our world photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.”

15. “In our world photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans “Remember” and “Never Again”... the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated.”

16. “I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans “Remember” and “Never Again”... the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city – and, although we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.”

17. “I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city – and, although we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.”

18. “Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.”

19. “The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow.”

20. “The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Cycling is an excruciating sport – a rider’s power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain – and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.”

21. “Cycling is an excruciating sport – a rider’s power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain – and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette’s...”

22. “My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette’s...”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there – these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful.”

23. “The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there – these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful.”

— Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch Quote: “Writing the forenames and family names of the victims down, with no other detail of age, or place, would fill twenty books. To begin to study the individual deaths would consume a hundred lifetimes. Which is why one of our deepest instincts can be simply to record names – individual lives, equally specific, equally valuable – never emphasizing one for fear of disrespecting another: listing them, as it were on a single stone wall – and steering away from blame or analysis.”

24. “Writing the forenames and family names of the victims down, with no other detail of age, or place, would fill twenty books. To begin to study the individual deaths would consume a hundred lifetimes. Which is why one of our deepest instincts can be simply to record names – individual lives, equally specific, equally valuable – never emphasizing one for fear of disrespecting another: listing them, as it were on a single stone wall – and steering away from blame or analysis.”

— Philip Gourevitch

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