Top 40 Greg Mortenson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The solution to terrorism is education, not bombs.”

— Greg Mortenson

2. “Slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.”

— Greg Mortenson

3. “The Pathan people of Waziristan are proud people who I greatly admire.”

— Greg Mortenson

4. “Do one good deed everyday and the world will be a better place.”

— Greg Mortenson

5. “If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.”

— Greg Mortenson

6. “Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.”

— Greg Mortenson

7. “When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.”

— Greg Mortenson

8. “I say if you fight terrorism, it’s based in fear, but if you promote peace, it’s based on hope.”

— Greg Mortenson

9. “Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything – even die.”

— Greg Mortenson

10. “But what I really believe is education is a key to pretty much everything – prosperity, economics, peace, stability.”

— Greg Mortenson

11. “When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance or compassion, we are all made richer by their example. Like the rivers that flow out of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, the inspiration they generate washes down to the rest of us. It waters everyone’s fields.”

— Greg Mortenson

12. “Really, what education does is it gives opportunity, but it also gives hope.”

— Greg Mortenson

13. “Just as the Torah and Bible teach concern for those in distress, the Koran instructs all Muslims to make caring for widows, orphans, and refugees a priority.”

— Greg Mortenson

14. “If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.”

— Greg Mortenson

15. “I used to climb mountains a lot; I decided to go to Pakistan to climb K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. I didn’t get quite to the top.”

— Greg Mortenson

16. “The older I get, the more I appreciate my childhood. It was paradise.”

— Greg Mortenson

17. “Yes, I first visited Korphe village, Braldu valley, Baltistan, Pakistan, after failing to summit K2 in 1993, and met Haji Ali, a long time dear mentor and friend. My second visit to Korphe was in 19.”

— Greg Mortenson

18. “All my fellows, why license is not deposed on the beautiful eyes of a beautiful lady? They fire at men like a bullet. They cut as surely as the sword.”

— Greg Mortenson

19. “When women take charge, things start to get out of control really fast.”

— Greg Mortenson

20. “I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.”

— Greg Mortenson

21. “When your kids accomplish something it means much more than anything you’ve done.”

— Greg Mortenson

22. “In ‘Three Cups of Tea’ I was fairly critical of the military. And I mentioned that they’re laptop warriors and there’s no boots on the ground. But I can say now that they’ve gone through a tremendous learning curve.”

— Greg Mortenson

23. “Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.”

— Greg Mortenson

24. “The Balti had as many names for rock as the Inuit have for snow.”

— Greg Mortenson

25. “My father ended up starting the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, which is on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. My mother started a school.”

— Greg Mortenson

26. “We all sat there laughing and sipping tea peacefully, an infidel and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. And I thought if we can get along this well, we can accomplish anything. The British policy was ‘divide and conquer.’ But I say ’unite and conquer.”

— Greg Mortenson

27. “Once I started the first school, I realized this is what my life is meant to be, is to promote education and help kids go to school, and that’s very clear.”

— Greg Mortenson

28. “You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.”

— Greg Mortenson

29. “He was a man who understood the virtue of small things.”

— Greg Mortenson

30. “Greg has never been on time in his life,” his mother said. “Ever he was a boy, Greg has always operated on African time.” In Africa, many people have a more relaxed attitude towards time than is common in the United States. What an African would consider on time, an American would probably think of as late.”

— Greg Mortenson

31. “And they did it with something that is basicly worthless in our society – pennies. But overseas, pennies can move mountains.”

— Greg Mortenson

32. “Despite everything that has befallen us, do we not continue to hold the destiny of this shattered and magnificent nation, together with the future of all our children-girls and boys alike-in the palm of our hands?”

— Greg Mortenson

33. “But what you’re trying to do is much more difficult than climbing K2.”

— Greg Mortenson

34. “The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment- an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili.”

— Greg Mortenson

35. “In Muslim societies, a person who has been manipulated unto believing in extremist violence or terrorism often seeks the permission of his mother before he may join a militant jihad and educated women as a rule, tend to withhold their blessings from such things.”

— Greg Mortenson

36. “I request America to look into our hearts and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people. Our land is stricken with poverty because we are without education. – Syed Abbas.”

— Greg Mortenson

37. “Yes, I was detained for eight days in Waziristan in 1996. It was against my will, and my passport and money were taken from me. I was not mistreated or harmed, but I was also not allowed to leave.”

— Greg Mortenson

38. “In times of war, you often hear leaders – Christian, Jewish, and Muslim – saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.”

— Greg Mortenson

39. “One thing that I noticed is having met some former Taliban is even they, as children, grew up being indoctrinated. They grew up in violence. They grew up in war. They were taught to hate. They were, they grew up in very ignorant cultures where they didn’t learn about the outside world.”

— Greg Mortenson

40. “I have always been dismayed by the West’s failure – or unwillingness – to recognize that establishing secular schools that offer children a balanced and nonextremist form of education is probably the cheapest and most effective way of combating this kind of indoctrination.”

— Greg Mortenson

41. “Liberals, conservatives, Muslims, Jews, Christians, and I find – I think education is something that can bring us together.”

— Greg Mortenson

42. “A wise man from my home once told me that these mountains have seen far too much suffering and killing, and that each rock and every boulder you see represents a mujahadeen who died fighting either the Russians or the Taliban. Then the man went on to say that now that the fighting is finished, it is time to build a new era of peace-and the first step in that process is to take up the stones and start turning them into schools.”

— Greg Mortenson

43. “People who live in the last places-the people who are most neglected and least valued by the larger world- often represent the best of who we are and the finest standards of what we are to become.”

— Greg Mortenson

44. “I decided in ’96 to dedicate my life to mostly promoting literacy and education for girls in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

— Greg Mortenson

45. “Isn’t it better to live in ignorance of everything – asphalt and macadam, vehicles, telephones, televisions – to live in bliss without knowing it?”

— Greg Mortenson

46. “Abdul brushed the dirt from the American’s forehead, where it had been pressed to the cool ground. “Not Pakistan man,” he said. “But if you say Bosnia, I believe.”

— Greg Mortenson

47. “I wish all the Americans who think ‘Muslim’ is just another way of saying ‘terrorist’ could have been there that day. The true core tenants of Islam are justice, tolerance, and charity.”

— Greg Mortenson

48. “Two decades of virtually uninterrupted fighting had made even the most dignified structures appear drunken, wounded, or lost. The entire city seemed to affirm the notion that warfare is a disease.”

— Greg Mortenson