Best 17 quotes of Paul Rusesabagina on MyQuotes

A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.

Everybody was willing to give me a job. But I wanted to do something different. I saw myself as an independent person, self-employed.

Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.

History never seems to teach us any lessons. But that is no reason to give up.

If we want to change things, we must first change ourselves. If we want to play - if we want to change the world - we must first show up on the field to score.

I think I'm a happy man, and I'm a blessed man. I have been able to adjust to any situation, whatever it was, in my life.

Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived.

Our days are so few, our existences so complicated. As long as we're breathing we shouldn't further complicate our lives.

Our time here on the earth is short, and our chance to make a difference is tiny. For me the grinding blocks of history came together in such a way that I was able to take what fragile defense I had and hold in place for seventy-six days. If I was able to give much it was only because I had some useful things from my life to give. I am a hotel manager...my job never changed, even in a sea of fire.

Pastors started killing their church members and church members killed pastors. Husbands killed wives. It's a situation no one can describe.

"There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population.

This is why I say that the individual's most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency.

We are all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act in inexplicable ways.

I have since thought a great deal about how people are able to maintain two attitudes in their minds at once. Take the colonel: He had come fresh from a world of machetes, road gangs, and random death and yet was able to have a civilized conversation with a hotel manager over a glass of beer and let himself be talked out of committing another murder. He had a soft side and a hard side and neither was in absolute control of his actions. It would have been dangerous to assume that he was this way or that way at any given point in the day. It was like those Nazi concentration camp guards who could come home from a day manning the gas chambers and be able to play games with their children, put a Bach record on the turntable, and make love to their wives before getting up to kill to more innocents. And this was not the exception—this was the rule. The cousin of brutality is a terrifying normalcy. So I tried never to see these men in terms of black or white. I saw them instead in degrees of soft and hard. It was the soft that I was trying to locate inside them; once I could get my fingers into it, the advantage was mine. If sitting down with abhorrent people and treating them as friends is what it took to get through to that soft place, then I was more than happy to pour the Scotch.

I still wonder how policy officials... can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enough, I think, to turn any reasonable man into a prisoner of his own conscience for the rest of his life.

It always amazes me how people in Europe and the United States can be so indifferent to the speeches of their chancellor or president, for these worlds from the top can be a wind sock for what might happen next.

It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of "ancient tribal hatreds." I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people.