Masamba Rwanda Quotes

Strong economic growth, and especially a significant increase in private sector investment, is the only sustainable path forward for Rwanda. ~ Paul Kagame

Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts. ~ Robert M. Sapolsky

I don't like vegans, either. Bunch of whiny zealots. A cow or a pig wouldn't give a damn if a person died… animals tear apart other animals while they're still alive, but we aren't so cruel, so vegans should learn to shut up. Vegans use palm oil and never think about the forests and endangered species at risk from that… and they all exploit the world in other ways, buying their computers and their sweatshop clothes and their Starbucks coffees. Anyway, cats and dogs eat their owners after the owner dies. I saw on the news a few times that there was a lot of open animal food in the houses where that sort of thing happens, but the pets eat the dead owner… just because. Maybe a pet's notion of 'unconditional love' is like Jeffrey Dahmer… he used to eat and kill the people he professed to love, too. He was a sicko… I don't believe animals have any empathy. Do elephants ever consider Holocaust victims? Do dogs ever cry over the Rwanda Genocide? ~ Rebecca McNutt

Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. ~ Neal Stephenson

The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in Somalia, in which thirty American troops were killed. President Clinton issued a directive on UN military conditions. The operations would also have to be directly relevant to American interests. These conditions excluded American support for UN intervention to stop the genocide [in Rwanda]. ~ Jonathan Glover

The good performed by some of United Nations institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has been outweighed by the amount of bad the UN has either abetted or allowed. It has enabled genocide in Rwanda, done little or nothing to stop genocide in the Congo and Sudan, given a respectable forum to tyrannies, convened conferences (the Durban Conferences on racism) that simply became forums for anti-Semitism, and been preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel. Its moral failings were further exemplified by its placing Qaddafi's Libya on its Human Rights Commission, Iran on its Commission on the Status of Women, and North Korea on the Nuclear Disarmament Commission. It is not that the people who run the United Nations are bad people; it is that the United Nations is run by a majority of the world's governments, and they are run by bad people. Without America in the Security Council, the bad would nearly always prevail. ~ Dennis Prager

It is better for a country to have a strong leader, this applies to the United States as well as to Rwanda. ~ Paul Kagame

Yet, only years after the Nazi-era, millions were sent to their deaths in places such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and the world once again took too long to act. ~ Allyson Schwartz

The history and national interest of Rwanda and the Rwandan people dictate our national orientation. ~ Paul Kagame

This year marks 20 years since the Rwandan genocide
the world's greatest humanitarian tragedy of the late 20th century. The international community had pledged 'never again' in the aftermath of the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Yet, we are witnessing today a different type of humanitarian disaster unfolding in Syria and Iraq. ~ Park Geun-hye

My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette's ... ~ Philip Gourevitch

If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing their soldiers at risk, he said, "then don't send soldiers, send Boy Scouts" - which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps [in Zaire]. ~ Philip Gourevitch

The beautiful faces of the children I've met in Rwanda and in other countries are with me every day and fuel my passion to raise awareness of the global hunger issue. That's why I'm urging everyone to join me and #PassTheRedCup for Yum! Brands' World Hunger Relief effort. Together we can move millions of children from hunger to hope. ~ Christina Aguilera

Your goal is not always going to be within your reach. At times you have to outstretch yourself to reach it. ~ Anesu Masamba

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

Sitting with Sindikubwabo [former President of Rwanda in exile in Zaire] as he offered what sounded like a rehearsal of the defense-by-obfuscation he was preparing for the tribunal, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight. ~ Philip Gourevitch

Israel and Rwanda both play an active part in international organizations, including the U.N., but I think it's true that our unique experiences as nations have shaped a fierce independence that we will not relinquish. ~ Paul Kagame

the humanitarian workers [in refugee camps in Goma} were treated rather like the service staff at a seedy mafia-occupied hotel: they were there to provide-food, medicine, housewares, an aura of respectability ~ Philip Gourevitch

Wherever God spends the day, He comes home to sleep in Rwanda. ~ Naomi Benaron

What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people's instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can't distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia. ~ Susan Meiselas

The U.N. has been so disappointing to date on the whole Rwanda issue that despite the people they've sent through, and I have no doubt their competence, in the end, the decision is going to be made by other people and not by them. ~ Tony Greig

We are preaching hope, standing on the bones of the past. ~ John Rucyahana

Rwanda is a landlocked country, but it hasn't stopped developing. They built a high-end tourism industry around the mountain gorillas. ~ Robert Zoellick

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.
[ Live 8 Concert, Mary Fitzgerald Square, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2 July 2005] ~ Nelson Mandela

I am still suffering from my experience in Rwanda, I never know when I'm going to drive my car off a bridge, or just decide to take my life. ~ Romeo Dallaire

We can make 'intelligent' missiles that can make war on one particular building hundreds of miles away, but we don't have an equivalent one that can make peace. Might that be because we have worshipped the gods of war, but have forgotten about worshipping the prince of peace? We can put a few men on the moon, but the few men who were standing between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 had to be withdrawn for lack of funds and political will. Might that be because we have worshipped the gods of technology, the gods who boost our own national security--the gods we have wanted, i other words--and have forgotten the God who asked Cain, 'Where is Abel your brother? ~ N.T. Wright

I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad. ~ John Pomfret

Helena's telling Sorcha that the media are OH! MY! GOD! totally ignoring what's going on in Rwanda, we're talking four years on from the genocide, with thousands of unarmed civilians being extrajudicially executed by government soldiers - 'It's like, HELLO?' - while almost 150,000 people detained in connection with the 1994 genocide are being held without, like, trial. She goes, 'I'm not even going to _stort_ on the thousands of refugees forcibly returned to Burundi. It's like, do NOT even go there.' Sorcha's saying that President Pasteur Bizimungu SO should be indicted for war crimes if half of what she's read on the Internet is true. She's there, 'It's like, OH! MY! GOD!' but I'm not really listening, roysh, I'm giving the old mince pies to Amanda, this total lasher who's, like, second year Orts. ~ Paul Howard

I dream of a world liberated of all diseases. Ignorance also upsets me a lot. How can one calmly look at the pictures from Rwanda and not instantly want to take action and try to ease the suffering? ~ Naomi Campbell

I am not responsible for creating an opposition, neither am I responsible for appointing my own successor. My job is to allow for the opposition to exist within what the realms of the law. There is space in Rwanda for political parties - if fact we have about a dozen of them - as long as their objective is not to take us back twenty two years. On that point, we are and will always be very vigilant. ~ Paul Kagame