Forest Whitaker Quotes

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

Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal.

As a child soldier, your rights are constantly violated.

There's no pride in having been a child soldier.

People always think about what prison is. What prison really is - it's not a physical challenge, it's mental.

Quite a few of the dogs that come back from Afghanistan or Iraq or police dogs that are involved in violent confrontations where there's gunfire can in fact exhibit the symptoms and suffer from PTSD.

I was fighting men at age 10.

A lot of child soldiers lose their minds.

Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

The lives of prisoners of war after they are returned is almost never discussed, never explored.

Disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11 were time-limited. The children who were affected psychologically could go to a place of normalcy.

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

It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.

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.

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.

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

When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues.

In Bosnia, little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child.

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.

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.

Yeah, my dad was in the foreign service. We lived in India, Indonesia and Africa, and we traveled a lot from those places. I was 10 when we moved back, and I felt like the odd guy out. It wasn't until later that I appreciated it. But coming back I didn't know any TV shows or music, which was even worse.

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.

When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody could get…