Camps Quotes

“Looking at the elementary schoolers in their colorful T-shirts from various day camps, Percy felt a twinge of sadness. He should be at Camp Half-Blood right now, settling into his cabin for the summer, teaching sword-fighting lessons in the arena, playing pranks on the other counselors. These kids had no idea just how crazy a summer camp could be.”

“This is our recurring temptation—to live within our camp’s caves, taking turns both as the shadow-puppeteers and the audience. We chant our camp’s mantras repeatedly so they continue reverberating in our skulls. When we stay entrenched within our belief-camps, we create the illusion of secure reality by reinforcing each other’s presuppositions and paradigms. We choose specific watering holes of information and evidence, and we influence each other in interpreting that data in accordance with the conclusions we desire. Our camps reinforce our existing cognitive biases, making cheating all the more common and easy.”

“There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhsof human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even registertheir names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing theothers around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were builton the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of thegovernment made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internalmigrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected andleaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they tooleaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensarieslacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe fivethousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes andkidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and thepandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, todream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that whywas that why was that why was that why was that.”

“We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.”

“People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.”

“The death camps seem easier to comprehend if we put them all into the basket of one vast generalization, which the term "death camps" implies, but in the process we mythologize or trivialize them.”

“Some days in the camp you prayed to live; some days you prayed to die quick. Some days you didn't bother praying, knowing there was no sense to anything.”

“Half of Syria's refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow to adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps. The camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.”

“...I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people in the camps – they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones. The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, "I'm free! I'm free!" And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people. - Roy Gates”