David Bailey Quotes

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television.

I feel that I am nine years old, seven and a half years in the Afghan Jihad, one and a half years in Jihad in Palestine and the rest of the years have no value.

Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years.

I've been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, 'Hey, this war is bogus,' to some guy who's 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

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.

War is too strange to process alone.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

I left Somalia when I was seven years old, but I witnessed a whole year in a war.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.