Amnesty Quotes

“AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“Let my silence grow with noise
as pregnant mothers grow with life.
Let my silence permeate these walls
as sunlight permeates a home.

Let the silence rise from unwatered graves
and craters left by bombs.
Let the silence rise from empty bellies
and surge from broken hearts.

The silence of the hidden and forgotten.
The silence of the abused and tortured.
The silence of the persecuted and imprisoned.
The silence of the hanged and massacred.

Loud as all the sounds can be,
let my silence be loud
so the hungry may eat my words
and the poor may wear my words.

Loud as all the sounds can be,
let my silence be loud
so I may resurrect the dead
and give voice to the oppressed.

My silence speaks.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“To properly do penance one must express contrition for one’s sins and perform acts to repair the damage caused by those transgressions. It is only when those acts are complete that the slate can truly be wiped clean and amnesty gives way to a new beginning.”
― Emily Thorne

“You just hear the wind. And you just see the stars above you.

They are beautiful.

And then . . . they're gone.”
― Griffin McElroy

“There is no amount of bad karma that can compete with a contrite spirit and God's forgiveness.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“We shall never know now whether Nazism, the concentration camps or Hiroshima were intelligible or not: we are no longer part of the same mental universe. Victim and executioner are interchangeable, responsibility is diffrangible, dissoluble - such are the virtues of our marvellous interface. We no longer have the strength that forgetting gives: our amnesia is an amnesia of the image. Since everyone is guilty, who will declare an amnesty? As for autopsy, no one believes any longer in the anatomical accuracy of the facts: we have only models to work on. Even supposing the facts lay shining bright before our eyes, they would still not have the power to prove or convince. Consider how continual scrutiny of Nazism, of the gas chambers and so on, has merely rendered them less and less comprehensible, so that it has eventually become logical to ask an incredible question: 'But, in the last reckoning, did all those things really exist?' The question is perhaps an intolerable one, but the interesting thing here is what it is that makes it logically possible. And in fact what makes it possible is the media's way of replacing any event, any idea, any history, with any other, with the result that the more we scrutinize the facts, the more carefully we study details with a view to identifying causes, the greater is the tendency for them to cease to exist, and to cease to have existed.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Hell is a place reserved for people who want their enemies to rot in Hell for sinning against them. Heaven is a place of amnesty; where the trespassers have forgiven their trespassers.”
― Atom Tate

“You know...I don't mind disappointing people. Perhaps that's a flaw in my character, but I think it has rather more to do with other people's failure to manage their own expectations. And everyone seems to have such varied expectations of me, how could I hope to fulfil them all?”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Amnesty