Quotes from Bono

I have climbed highest mountains, I have run through the field, only to be with you. I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

Ireland has a very different attitude to success than a lot of places, certainly than over here in the United States. In the United States, you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill, and you think, you know, one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion. In Ireland, people look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go, one day, I'm going to get that bastard. It's a different mind-set.

For me it's a puzzle. I hear strains of a melody, and only when I work it out to its end can I be at peace. Until then it's like a twitch.

The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.

As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both.

Marriage is this grand madness, and I think if people knew that, they would perhaps take it more seriously.

Rock 'n' roll is ridiculous. It's absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that's what makes them extraordinary.

The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there.

Rock music is niche.

I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable.

When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world's poorest people.

Overcoming my dad telling me that I could never amount to anything is what has made me the megalomaniac that you see today.

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

Selling out is doing something you don't really want to do for money. That's what selling out is.

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

You've got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.