Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

If anybody tried to threaten me I would simply look him in the eye and ask him in a firm but friendly voice, "Why?" The bully would have no choice but to engage me verbally, and this made violence next to impossible. I learned that it is very difficult to fight someone with whom you are already talking.

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.

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.

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

If you stay friendly with monsters you can find cracks in their armor to exploit. Shut them out and they can kill you without a second thought. I reminded myself of this over and over.

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.

Wherever the killing season should next begin and people should become strangers to their neighbors and themselves, my hope is that there will still be those ordinary men who say a quiet no and open the rooms upstairs.

Human beings were designed to live sanely, and sanity always returns.

Quiet, ordinary people are often the only people with the real ability to defeat evil. They can give it the Rwandan no.

Between January 1993 and March 1994, a total of half a million machetes were imported into my country from various overseas suppliers.

It was not the largest genocide in the history of the world, but it was the fastest and most efficient.