Paul Rusesabagina Quotes & Sayings

It always amazes me how people in Europe and the United States can be so indifferent to the speeches of their chancellor or president, for these worlds from the top can be a wind sock for what might happen next. — Paul Rusesabagina

Our days are so few, our existences so complicated. As long as we're breathing we shouldn't further complicate our lives. — Paul Rusesabagina

History never seems to teach us any lessons. But that is no reason to give up. — Paul Rusesabagina

Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived. — Paul Rusesabagina

Pastors started killing their church members and church members killed pastors. Husbands killed wives. It's a situation no one can describe. — Paul Rusesabagina

It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of "ancient tribal hatreds." I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people. — Paul Rusesabagina

Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense. — Paul Rusesabagina

I think I'm a happy man, and I'm a blessed man. I have been able to adjust to any situation, whatever it was, in my life. — Paul Rusesabagina

If we want to change things, we must first change ourselves. If we want to play
if we want to change the world
we must first show up on the field to score. — Paul Rusesabagina

The other thing you have to understand was that the message crept into our national consciousness very slowly. It did not happen all at once. We did not wake up one morning to hear it pouring out of the radio at full strength. It started with a sneering comment, the casual use of the term "cockroach," the almost humorous suggestion that Tutsis should be airmailed back to Ethiopia. Stripping the humanity from an entire group of people takes time. It is an attitude that requires cultivation, a series of small steps, daily tending. — Paul Rusesabagina

A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time. — Paul Rusesabagina

This is why I say that the individual's most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency. — Paul Rusesabagina

I still wonder how policy officials ... can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enough, I think, to turn any reasonable man into a prisoner of his own conscience for the rest of his life. — Paul Rusesabagina

"There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population." — Paul Rusesabagina

Our time here on the earth is short, and our chance to make a difference is tiny. For me the grinding blocks of history came together in such a way that I was able to take what fragile defense I had and hold in place for seventy-six days. If I was able to give much it was only because I had some useful things from my life to give. I am a hotel manager ... my job never changed, even in a sea of fire. — Paul Rusesabagina

Everybody was willing to give me a job. But I wanted to do something different. I saw myself as an independent person, self-employed. — Paul Rusesabagina

We are all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act in inexplicable ways. — Paul Rusesabagina

There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass. — Paul Rusesabagina