Edin Dzeko Quotes

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

I grew up knowing only war, so for me, it was the way things were. It wasn't pleasant by any means.

I have been through two wars in my 24 years, and I know what it's like to be without anything, to see the bombs flying above your head.

The war begins to make itself felt very near to us.

There are many people who live with terrorism every day.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that.

There are worse things than war.

My childhood ended in 1942. I was 12, and for the next three years, I lived under incessant bombings. It was a life of constant fear.

There is no doubt that the people of Afghanistan have suffered for a long time. Generations have been lost to terrorism. We empathise with their yearning for peace.

I was born and raised in war.

When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.

One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.

My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.

I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.