Dikembe Mutombo Quotes

Africa has been troubled for a long time - well, the world has been troubled ever since I was born.

It is useless to talk virtue to a starving girl.

As the president of Afghanistan I look at the suffering of our people as a whole.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

I may not remember the name of a book's author, but let it be clear, what I will not forget is the violence, the poverty and the desperation that Mexico is living through.

I'm from South Sudan, that is where my heart will always be.

Most people only see Africa in terms of poverty and war, famine and disease.

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

When you ask people what they think of Africa, they think of AIDS, genocide, disasters, famine.

You don't grow up naive in Africa.

In my view, Africa's real problems are cultural.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

I don't think anyone who has been to Africa comes away untouched by the place. You see a lot of beauty and optimism, but you also come away with an awareness of the huge gulf between what most of us have and what most of them have to make do with. Then, every now and then, a famine or a war makes everything a hundred times worse.

It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer.

I've lived places these guys can't defecate in.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

In my view, the humanity of our world can be measured against the fate of Africa.

At the time of independence in 1975, Mozambique was extremely poor. Many Portuguese residents abandoned the country, leaving only a handful of well-educated Mozambicans to try to run the country.

I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables?

I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality.

Why should there be such abject poverty?

The Lord only knows how many times I let my children go hungry rather than take secretly the bread I liked not to ask for.

People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome.

In many respects, Afghanistan represents a more difficult problem set. It does not have a number of the blessings that Iraq has in terms of the oil, gas, land of two rivers, the human capital that Iraq built up over the years, the muscle memory of a strong government - albeit one that was corrupted over time.

Africa is the continent that the rest of the world prefers not to think about.