Michael Portillo Quotes

In Kurdistan, there's a lot of hardship - a lot of wars, a lot of bitter and difficult lifestyles. And witnessing all those made me a director.

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.

I grew up during the Revolution of Iran and the war between Iran and Iraq. The things that I saw. The impact. How it changes you. How it changes the way you look at the world.

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 don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.

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.

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.

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.

What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

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

There's a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?

Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.

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.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

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

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

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

I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters.

War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things.

We Beate the Savages outt of the Island burned their howses Ransaked their Temple Tooke down the Corpes of their deade kings from out of their Toambes And caryed away their pearles.... The Salvages still contineweinge their mallice Ageinste us.

The kids who were brought up on minefields should be able to catch up with the kids who were brought up on soccer fields.

There are worse things than war.

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