Eddie Vedder Quotes

I understand that it's incredibly difficult to watch what's happening on the news every day and not become inured to it. I've fallen victim to that myself, wanting to look away.

We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

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.

Famine and disaster, right there in front of you, and the more you watch, the less you do.

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.

We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last - but eat you he will.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

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.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

The question in their minds was, why did the outside world, and particularly the Western world, produce all these landmines, and send them to Afghanistan? This business must be stopped. It's a dirty business to produce such a horrible device.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.

World history is tragic.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

Africa has been troubled for a long time - well, the world has been troubled ever since I was born.

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.

People get numbed when they see picture after picture, year in and year out, of people starving.

Stored today in the arsenals of the most enlightened Christian nations are enough bullets to kill every man, woman and child on earth.

I have just gotten to the point where I have been very, very disgusted with the fact that nothing is going on down there.

What the Serbs are doing is an international crime. What the world is not doing is also an international crime.

Undoubtedly, to salve your conscience, you have now and then helped some miserable human being, but millions of human beings were murdered and nary a protest was heard.

While most nations seemed to agree that something had to be done, every nation seemed to have a reason why some other nation should do it. So we sat, waiting for a promise to be kept, reduced to the role of accountants keeping track of how many were being killed.

Unfortunately, this country requires body bags before it will act...