Haiti Quotes

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere; some say the poorest in the world.

I have a huge heart for Haiti and will tell the world how we can help!

The future of Haiti must be linked to the respect of the rights of every single citizen.

Haiti fell over? Who built Haiti? Two of the three little pigs?!

For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. for three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant split blood and tears for blacks.

The last five-six presidents of Haiti have failed miserably. And I don't think it would be an honor for me to say I want to be the next 'president.' I want to be the man by with whom change arrives.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."

People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.

I think if you want good things to happen for a country like Haiti, then you need to provide the circumstances where the Haitians can do that.

Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.

Everything in Haiti right now is a priority.

This was a "bad" example for U.S. slaves. Haiti was subjected to an embargo from the United States, which, along with many other countries, refused to recognize this new republic.

Haiti is my country. The same way the Beatles are received in England - that's how Wyclef Jean is received in Haiti, do you know what I mean?

The Hope, Love & Healing necklace is the perfect embodiment of what we are trying to bring to Haiti through safe and sustainable housing, sanitation solutions, and water filtration devices.

The US intervened in the Philippines to uplift and christianize the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries.

In my work in Haiti, I've seen the hugely positive effects that happen when people come together to build something in the middle of the most desperate situations.

I know how the American people care for that democratic principle. They want to see their vote respected. As we in Haiti want to see the vote of the people respected.

The first time Haiti had free and fair democratic elections was 1990, when I was elected.

Let's redefine scandal. Scandal is not who's dating who. Scandal is 1.2 million people living in tents in Haiti.

We must consider bringing forward legislation that will facilitate the creation and implementation of businesses in Haiti. Overall, we must better position the country to compete for new market opportunities.

There had been a free and open election in Haiti in the early 1990s and president Jean-Bertrand Aristide won, a populist priest. A few months later came the expected military coup - a very vicious military junta took over, of which the United States was passively supportive. Not openly, of course, but Haitians started to flee from the terror and were sent back and on towards Guantanamo Bay. Of course, that is against International Law. But the United States pretended that they were "economic refugees."

A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.

It was shameful that, after Haiti, Colombia was the second most unequal country in Latin America. But we've achieved some things; the inequality is coming down, and coming down fast. The growing economy has provided us with the funds to finance a very progressive social policy that has reduced extreme poverty. We have the lowest inflation rate of all Latin-America countries and the highest growth rate.

If you look at the Associated Press wires, there's a constant flow of information coming in. At that time I happened to have direct access to AP wires. The day the marines landed in Haiti and restored [ Jan Bètran] Aristide there was a lot of excitement about the dedication to democracy and so on. But the day before the marines landed, when every journalist was looking at Haiti because it was assumed that something big was happening, the AP wires reported that then [Bill] Clinton administration had authorized Texaco to ship oil illegally to the military junta.

It turned out that [Bill] Clinton had authorized Texaco to illegally ship oil to the military junta [in Haiti] during a time when we were supposedly opposing the military junta and supporting democracy instead.

The inaction of the international community towards Guatemala is injustifiable. The community should play an active role with concrete measures and sanctions imposed, as was the case in South Africa, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Cuba and Haiti. Why for us no? Why legalize death in one place and somewhere else no? This is clear in our memories.

Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.

Haiti is unique - the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it's like nothing the world has ever seen.

The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.

Haiti was founderd by a righteous revolution in 1804 and became the first black republic. It was the first country to break the chains of slavery, the first to force Emperor Napoleon to retreat, and the only to aid Simón Bolívar in his struggle to liberate the indigenous people and slaves of Latin America from their colonial oppressors.

If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.

While she [Hillary Clinton] may have a - give lip service to progressive issues, she led the charge, and there she definitely did, in Haiti, to push down the minimum wage from 60 cents an hour down to 40 cents an hour. She, you know, has been the good friend of the big banks forever, and the insurance companies.

Haiti is 10.4-million people, of whom 35 per cent are children under 15. The country has always had great potential - and this is still the case. Our ill fortune has long been a matter of bad governance. And now things have changed.

What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.

Haiti is the kind of place that grabs your heart, and never lets go ... When you arrive in Port-au-Prince, the first thing that strikes you is how vibrant the colors are. Buses, buildings, fences, clothing, everything is brightly painted in primary hues. On closer inspection, you see the reality behind this brightly colored landscape: a dark, grinding poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere.

I don't see any negativity with what Brad Pitt is doing with his Make It Right Foundation, or what Sean Penn is trying to do in Haiti.

Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.

Dear friends of Haiti, we are indeed on the right track. Slowly but surely we are rising from the ashes.

If you love Black people, why are you destroying Haiti? If you love Black people, why did you, [Hillary] Clinton, stop them from the rice that they were producing in Haiti to feed themselves and other Caribbean nations? You put the rice industry out of business; and now rice is coming from Arkansas, chicken coming from Arkansas, when it once was growing right there in Haiti.

Condelleza Rice and Colin Powell are both dangerous people. What they did in Haiti [2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide] is a good measure of it. They destroyed a democracy. They squelched loans that had been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything behind the scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun the country. They're frauds.

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

There is a reason why Nelson Mandela went to Cuba to praise Castro and thank the Cuban people almost as soon as he got out of jail. That's a third world reaction and they understand it. Cuba played an enormous role in the liberation of Africa and the overthrow of Apartheid, sending doctors and teachers to the poorest places in the world, to Haiti, to Pakistan after the earthquake, almost everywhere. The internationalism is just astonishing. I don't think there has been anything like it in history.

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.

When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

The Haiti that has been waiting for help and not moving no longer exists. Enough handouts; we need hands up. Enough aid; we need trade.

We didn't hear a word about the Clinton Global Initiative. We didn't hear a word about all the masterful, wonderful things they've done in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. Why not? If you're extolling the virtues of the change, "She [Hillary Clinton] makes more change, she's done more change than anybody in my lifetime! I've never met somebody who is better change."

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

Haiti, like any place, has its security problems; it has a great challenge in terms of establishing a kind of globally acceptable rule of law.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

Haiti, which has been the main target of US intervention throughout the 20th century, is the poorest. And Guatemala, which is maybe the third major target of US intervention, probably ranks third poorest.