Martin McGuinness Quotes

Most of my young years were spent under the boots of the military.

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.

It's shocking that so many children still live in fear as a result of violence in the home, and don't know who to turn to for help and support. As a child survivor of domestic violence I can remember the fear and isolation. I'm delighted to support the Hideout, the new Women's Aid website for children and young people. I know it could have made a real difference to me and will provide great comfort and support to thousands of children.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

Abuse is the means in which violence retards love.

Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

When there's an adult person who's scaring you, you grow up pretty quickly.

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

I woke up and all I could see was Iraqis standing all around me, looking down upon me. I knew at that moment something terrible had happened and I wasn't in the right place.

I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.

I was a high school senior and home alone one night with my younger brother. And a guy - gunman - kicked in our front door at our home in New Jersey and held the two of us captive. We escaped. He caught us again. We escaped again. So, a pretty horrific experience.

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.

Be as terrible as the Hun.

Where the German soldier stands, no other shall put his foot.

The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.

We make everyone get into his house by seven p.m., and we only tell a man once. If he refuses, we shoot him. We killed over 300 natives the first night. They tried to set the town on fire. If they fire a shot from the house we burn the house down and every house near it, and shoot the natives, so they are pretty quiet in town now.

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.

I was forced to be political because I had bombs falling on me as a child in Tehran.

Having been raised during the war, I know very well how childhood hampered by displacement, poverty, violence, and fear looks like.

It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.