Edward Zwick Quotes

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.

As a journalist, I have spent years reporting on often difficult and depressing conflicts, on poverty, and the inhuman way we sometimes treat each other.

We assume that we've come so far as compassionate citizens of the world if we do choose to read the news, yet the attitude towards life can be one where we put blinders on and forget that there are civil wars going on. It's easy to forget that there are so many people starving to death every single day.

The Middle East is ailing. The malady stems from pervasive violence, shortages of food, water and educational opportunities, discrimination against women and - the most virulent cause of all - the absence of freedom.

A major geopolitical disaster

I grew up in a country that was in a civil conflict for most of my childhood and adolescence. I saw violence and lived as a teenager through the time of a brutal dictator called Idi Amin. I fled and became a refugee.

We have to see the sufferings of Punjab and focus ourselves to address them.

War damages men - and Syria is no different.

But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

The 'Third World' is a term I don't like very much because we're all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.

I'm not a war photographer. I've always dealt with the consequences of conflict.

In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over - if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua - that even in conditions of peace they don't seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human suffering is enormous.

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

My giving birth was nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.

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.

We don't live in a particularly attractive world. I don't really remember, except as a small boy, anything but a pretty grim world.

We must do all we can to help improve the deplorable human rights situation of the North Korean people.

It's a sad fact that a lot of those countries who haven't been involved in the war in Iraq have taken far more responsibility for rehoming people displaced by the war than Britain has done.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother... We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

War is not cheap, but it's the human cost that's the highest.

It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.