Pol Pot Quotes

Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.

I did not join the resistance movement to kill people, to kill the nation. Look at me now. Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.

He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.

Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.

We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.

To kill the grass you must also remove the root

If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

Exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese and purify the masses of the [Cambodian] people.

I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.

Hunger is the most effective disease.

No gain in keeping, no loss in weeding out.

When I die, my only wish is that Cambodia remain Cambodia and belong to the West. It is over for communism, and I want to stress that.

In Khmer we have a saying that when one is both quite sick and old there remains only one thing, that you die.

If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar will put aside a small piece of land for you.

The first time I heard of Tuol Sleng, it was on the Voice of America. I listened twice.

I came to join the revolution, not to kill the Cambodian people. Look at me now. Am I a violent person? No. So, as far as my conscience and my mission were concerned, there was no problem.

I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell people I'm a leader.

Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.

I do not reject responsibility - our movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world. But there was another aspect that was outside our control - the enemy's activities against us.

The Vietnamese... wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia.

The sick are victims of their own imagination.

If someone is very hungry, the Angkar will take him where he will be stuffed with food.

It's up to history to judge.

I'm quite satisfied on one thing: If we had not carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have become another Kampuchea Krom in 1975.

I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people.

For the genuine materialist there is no fundamental, but only a gradual, an “evolutionary” difference, between man and a pest, a noxious insect

Generals, on the average, are far less bellicose than journalists or patriotic housewives: They know the horrors of a war and they dislike any break in the routine