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Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Genocide is an attempt to exterminate a people, not to alter their behavior.

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

I think today that it is essential that the Rwandan tribunal continues to prosecute efficiently. And if the U.N. fails to do that, it is sending entirely the wrong message to people who are in the position to complete these atrocities again.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

The biggest road block to action on genocide and other human rights crimes is ignorance. Most people just don't know that such things are happening, and often, if they have a vague idea they are happening, there is a feeling that there is nothing that can be done to stop these crimes.

In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don't know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars.

If there's a clear genocide somewhere, don't we really want to positively impact that kind of a situation? Isn't that what we're all about? Isn't that what we've always been about?