Andy Ruiz Jr. Quotes

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.

A lot of child soldiers lose their minds.

I punched my mother out once.

More and more, we have been able to present the argument that recruitment of child soldiers is a social breakdown that leads to atrocities, because that's why they get them.

Northern Uganda presents a situation of extraordinary violation of the rights of children.

More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

Everyone is an abused child, if you think about what governments do.

My father taught me how to fight when I was 5.

I dished out and suffered my fair share of bloody noses.

Attacking women and children was both wrong and counter—productive.

I ran away. I kept running away. Almost once a week, I'd run away from those schools. They'd catch me. They'd bring me back to the school, beat me. And it was - it was terrible.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

Violence is violence. Trauma is trauma. And we are taught to downplay it, even think about it as child's play.

I grew up getting bullied and fighting a lot.

'Beasts of No Nation' began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.

What is the matter with these people, these people who won't stop fighting, won't stop hurting each other...?

Daddy gave me real useful information to protect me in the real world. If anyone hits me, I'm not to hit them back. I wait until their back is turned, then hit them in the head with a brick.

The battles, the fights, the bruises, the bites. That's the way true love grows.

I slammed the door in the child's face, a horrific scream trapped in my throat.

I like it better that people aren't throwing stuff at my face and trying to fight me on stage. Like in the '80s, it was just aggravating all the time... I have scars from cigars and cigarettes on me, Bic pens, burns from cigarette lighters, all that.

In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.

The problem to me is violence. It's not cool to kill somebody or hurt people.

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