Alek Wek Quotes

Americans are not used to being bombed in their beds, but if you come from anywhere outside America, it's not highly unusual.

It's important that we elevate and primarily focus on the rights of American citizens, but it's also important that we don't forget, 95 percent of the world's population lives beyond our own borders.

Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.

I know somebody in every culture.

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.

No, I'm not a French designer either. I'm from nowhere. I'm a European, old European is all I am.

Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans or Israelis.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

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.

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.

The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.

I understand the world solely as a field for cultural competition among the peoples.

Anybody that's ever been to Israel and to Palestine knows that you can't look at a person and tell if they're Israeli or Palestinian. You can assume. But I've seen Palestinians who look Swedish, and I've seen Israelis who are black.

In many regions, war and terror prevail. States disintegrate. For many years, we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.

China is just so different from the rest of the world.

You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift.

I love being a foreigner.

I do worry about civil unrest, or complete collapse of society, or having to flee, or Europe falling into a war.

As a government, it is our responsibility to maintain security for all citizens in Darfur.

I'm from South Sudan, that is where my heart will always be.

I fought for years in South Sudan for the unity of Sudan. I was a commander in the fields, fighting for the unity of Sudan.

I go to Uganda, I can't speak the language. In India, I'm black. In the black community, I'm dark-skinned. In America, I'm British.

I'm Italian, but I'm also a little Brazilian: Pirlonho, if you like.

The world is in America. In Italy is only Italy. France is full of France. Germany is full of Germany. In a continent that contains the entire world, contradictions are, of course, constantly arising.

The year when I left my country, there was still peace. The year after, the war broke out, a lot of people lost their homes, lost their families. When I go back 20 years later I still find people living in refugee camps. So I tried to help them find homes.