Bono Quotes

Many can claim to love music, but very few, in my experience, can claim music loves them back,

Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief. All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief.

Taste is the enemy of a good death.

Don't get me too excited because I use four letter words when I get excited. I'd just like to say to the parents, your children are safe, your country is safe, the FCC has taught me a lesson and the only four letter word I'm going to use today is P-E-N-N. Come to think of it 'Bono' is a four-letter word. The whole business of obscenity — I don't think there's anything certainly more unseemly than the sight of a rock star in academic robes. It's a bit like when people put their King Charles spaniels in little tartan sweats and hats. It's not natural, and it doesn't make the dog any smarter.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

There is anyway a kind of off-color romance to a deserted seaside town in the winter,

[On the persecutions of Rohingya in Myanmar, and Aung San Suu Kyi‎'s lack of response to them] That is very hard, and I'm – I feel kind of nauseous about that. I have genuinely felt ill, because I can't quite believe what the evidence all points to. But there is ethnic cleansing. It really is happening, and she has to step down because she knows it's happening. I am sure she has many great reasons in her head why she is not stepping down. Maybe it's that she doesn't want to lose the country back to the military. But she already has, if the pictures are what we go by, anyway. The human rights that are being torched, the lives that are being burned out in Rakhine State are more important than a unity without them. … She should, at the very least, be speaking out more. And if people don't listen, then resign. This is all just really troubling. I am still confounded by it, actually. I am still confounded by it, actually. … Is it that we project onto people who we want them to be? We find somebody we like, and we tell ourselves that a person exists that is better than us. More able than us. A truer moral compass than us. We imbue them with all these qualities. We do that with people. I think I have had it done to me. People have their version of you, they project what they want to see on you. Maybe she was always a politician. She was not a saint. She was not some sort of savior. Maybe we were always wrong, and we just have to accept we were wrong. Or maybe something terrible has happened to her that we just don't know.

You belong only to the here and now. This is no Oceanus of faceless faces; you are trying to make eye contact with everyone. But you can’t … until you can. If you get it right, you’ve not just eyeballed everybody in the front row; you’ve eyeballed everybody in the venue. And there’s no one who doesn’t think you might follow them home, that you might pick their pocket or preach them your gospel or make out with them. Or their sister. Contact has been made, real and imagined.

My fear is that I/we have fallen asleep in the comfort of our freedom.

The great gifts of models are not that they're more beautiful than the next person, it's that they're able to be photographed and not be self-conscious.

Patricide. The stuff of the great operas. U2’s music was never really rock ’n’ roll. Under its contemporary skin it’s opera — a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day. A tenor out front who won’t accept he’s a baritone. A small man singing giant songs.

We could defend ourselves. But even though some of us became pretty good at violence ourselves, others didn't. They got the shit kicked out of 'em. I thought that was kind of normal. I can remember incredible street battles. I remember one madster with an iron bar, just trying to bring it down on my skull as hard as he possibly could, and holding up a dustbin lid, which saved my life. Teenage kids have no sense of mortality — yours or theirs.

The greatest songwriting is never conclusive, but the search for conclusion

Why I view friendship as a kind of sacrament and how my traveling companion in the way of faith had metamorphosed from the father figure of the Old Testament to the companion and friend of the New Testament.