Bono Quotes

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

I'm the first to admit that there's something unnatural... something unseemly... about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents, and then disappearing to their villas in the South of France. Talk about a fish out of water. It was weird enough when Jesse Helms showed up at a U2 concert... but this is really weird, isn't it?

It was a line on our second album, October, that led from one record to the other. In 1981, a young man, I’d sung, “I can’t change the world but I can change the world in me.” Now, in my fifties, I found myself writing something different: “I can change the world, but I can’t change the world in me.

story that will sketch out the first U2 album, Boy, including its cover and final track, “Shadows and Tall Trees,” which borrows its title from chapter 7 of the book:

What we're about in this band, I hope...is that we put people before ideas.

Let me tell you something. I've had enough of Irish Americans who haven't been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home; and the glory of the revolution, and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don't talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What's the glory of taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where's the glory in that? Where's the glory of bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-age-pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day? Where's the glory in that? To leave them dying, or crippled for life, or dead, under the rubble of the revolution that the majority of the people in my country don't want. No more! Sing No more!

— that we humans have little or no influence on the two most important moments of our life. Being born and dying. That felt like the right kind of fuck-you to the universe that a great punk rock song requires.

Great friendships explain why we hold on to this life so tightly because it disappears so quickly.

Stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Find out what God's doing. It's already blessed.

There's a point where you find yourself tiptoeing as an artist, and then you know that you're in the wrong place.

The search for common ground starts with the search for higher ground - even with your opponents...especially with your opponents.

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience

If your heart was hard, that would be better / You could only break it once or twice / After that it would be rid of blood and you could let it turn to ice.

don’t scare you, they are not big enough.

All That You Can't Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb are both really mad long titles. As I've just said them, I've just realised how ridiculous the titles are.