Top 100 Bono Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world.”

— Bono

52. “If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu?”

— Bono

53. “Facts, like people, want to be free – and when they’re free, liberty is usually around the corner.”

— Bono

54. “I wouldn’t run for President. I wouldn’t want to move to a smaller house.”

— Bono

55. “U2 was involved in Live Aid, and I ended up going to Ethiopia and working there for some time with my wife, Ali.”

— Bono

56. “The less you know, the more you believe.”

— Bono

57. “The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.”

— Bono

58. “I don’t believe the devil, I don’t believe his book, but the truth is not the same without the lies he made up.”

— Bono

59. “U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.”

— Bono

60. “As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.”

— Bono

61. “There is a root arrogance in any writer; a hugely arrogant assumption that anyone is going to listen to them.”

— Bono

62. “People rid the room of argument until they have no one left – except people who agree with them. It is understandable. But I like a good argument.”

— Bono

63. “We’re starting our own religion at last. The Order of Frisbeetarians. We believe that when you die, your soul ascends to a rooftop and you can never get it back.”

— Bono

64. “I’m never nervous when I go to meet heads of state. I feel they should be nervous, because they are the ones who’ll be held accountable for the lives their decisions will impact the most.”

— Bono

65. “Let’s not bequeath the pop charts to just children.”

— Bono

66. “Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties; it doubts our concern, and it questions our commitment. Six and a half thousand Africans are still dying every day of preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity: This is about Justice and Equality.”

— Bono

67. “If you stop taking chances, you’ll stay where you sit. You won’t live any longer, but it’ll feel like it.”

— Bono

68. “I’m as skeptical as anyone would be about celebrities and causes – and I will dare to say to you that I don’t think of myself as a celebrity per se.”

— Bono

69. “Religion often gets in the way of God.”

— Bono

70. “Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.”

— Bono

71. “Essentially, I’m a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I’m attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I’m the guy that would not turn the other cheek – but, when people see you’re attracted to that, they think you are that.”

— Bono

72. “One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...”

— Bono

73. “The great gifts of models are not that they’re more beautiful than the next person, it’s that they’re able to be photographed and not be self-conscious.”

— Bono

74. “Because you know when you first become famous, you start walking a little different because people are staring at you.”

— Bono

75. “I will admit that we are attracted to issues that unify people rather than divide them.”

— Bono

76. “ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We’re a life cult. Rock ’n’ roll is a life force, and it’s joy as an act of defiance.”

— Bono

77. “The moment of surrender is the moment you choose to lose control of your life, the split second of powerlessness where you trust that some kind of “higher power” better be in charge, because you certainly aren’t.”

— Bono

78. “I mostly find religiosity annoying, right up at the top of the annoying is the pigheaded certainty of the devout without the doubt.”

— Bono

79. “Fame is a currency. I want to spend mine on the right stuff.”

— Bono

80. “The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.”

— Bono

81. “I hadn’t done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen. I didn’t need to. I felt the pinch of wonder.”

— Bono

82. “Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.”

— Bono

83. “The elephant in the room” is a phrase I enjoy, having at different times been either elephant or room. We can lose ourselves in situations or conversations and miss the obvious. We’re looking for someone to save us or a solution to a problem, and they’re right in front of us hiding in plain sight.”

— Bono

84. “There’s stuff you can learn from people who don’t tell you anything. Like how not to react when there is a crisis. Like how to stay still and maybe even unearth levity from the seriousness of a situation. Edge is the silence inside every noise. He’s the light inside the paint.”

— Bono

85. “The stuff of the great operas. U2’s music was never really rock ’n’ roll. Under its contemporary skin it’s opera – a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day.”

— Bono

86. “The search for common ground starts with the search for higher ground, even with your opponents, especially with your opponents... You don’t have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough.”

— Bono

87. “We can debate whether information or matter is at the heart of the physical universe, but there is no argument that the essential building block of the rock ‘n’ roll solar system is the van.”

— Bono

88. “Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars. All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port. With that rope you can pull yourself closer to God. Songs are my prayers.”

— Bono

89. “Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.”

— Bono

90. “I’m not sure a professional psychologist would agree, but something in me understands that until we deal with our most traumatic traumas, there’s a part of us that stays at the age at which we encountered them.”

— Bono

91. “It takes great faith to have no faith.”

— Bono

92. “Climbing into the ring, the best-prepared fighter is the one who has tried to understand their opponent. Especially if it’s yourself.”

— Bono

93. “Our work is borders, crossing them. Borders are a big attraction for me, leaving one country on the way to another, leaving one thought on the way to another, leaving our teens for our twenties, leaving East for West Germany. The liminal is the place to be. The bleeding edge. The demilitarized zones of the psyche, the gray ones of the heart. No-man’s-land is yes-man’s-land.”

— Bono

94. “I’m lost, I’ll probably always be lost.”

— Bono

95. “I’m drawn to conversation because in the best kind you don’t know where you’re going, only that you will get somewhere good.”

— Bono

96. “You can disagree on everything but still work together on one thing... if that one thing is important enough.”

— Bono

97. “I’d given myself a license to look back, to lift up stones under which I knew lay creepy-crawlies.”

— Bono

98. “Doing my homework one day, in the little box room in Cedarwood Road, I looked out the window as Guck Pants went by on a unicycle. Playing the trumpet.”

— Bono

99. “When you’re open, a hitchhiker – a “randomer,” as my daughter Eve calls them – can become an angel.”

— Bono

100. “Suicide offers quick authority over a life that feels it has lost all agency.”

— Bono