Quotes By Bono

Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, 'Would you take my son with you?' He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

Overcoming my dad telling me that I could never amount to anything is what has made me the megalomaniac that you see today.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.

Celebrity is ridiculous and silly and it's mad that people like me are listened to - you know, rap stars and movie stars.

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist.

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we're a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn't being ironic.

You've got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world's poorest people.

Africa will thrive.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

Particularly conservative Christians, I was very angry that they were not involved more in the AIDS emergency.

You know, God has some really weird kids, and I find it hard to be in their company most of the time.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

Rock music is niche.

It's so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this.

It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

Marriage is this grand madness, and I think if people knew that, they would perhaps take it more seriously.

God's Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm.

I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America.

Anyone that's involved in development has discovered that all the good work that's been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that's what makes them extraordinary.

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.