Roméo Dallaire Quotes

I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.

~ Roméo Dallaire

Where you are born should not dictate your potential as a human being.

~ Roméo Dallaire

Rwanda will never ever leave me. It's in the pores of my body. My soul is in those hills, my spirit is with the spirits of all those people who were slaughtered and killed that I know of, and many that I didn't know. … Fifty to sixty thousand people walking in the rain and the mud to escape being killed, and seeing a person there beside the road dying. We saw lots of them dying. And lots of those eyes still haunt me, angry eyes or innocent eyes, no laughing eyes. But the worst eyes that haunt me are the eyes of those people who were totally bewildered. They're looking at me with my blue beret and they're saying, What in the hell happened? We were moving towards peace. You were there as the guarantor -- their interpretation -- of the mandate. How come I'm dying here? Those eyes dominated and they're absolutely right. How come I failed? How come my mission failed? How come as the commander who has the total responsibility-- We learn that, it's ingrained in us, because when we take responsibility it means the responsibility of life and death, of humans that we love.

~ Roméo Dallaire

If we don't harness their potential for good, their societies will continue to reap their capacity for evil.

~ Roméo Dallaire

The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.

~ Roméo Dallaire

I think that one of the benefits of optimism and idealism is that they lead you into things you would never have tried if you'd let yourself imagine how hard it was going to turn out to be.

~ Roméo Dallaire

Money follows interest, and interest is largely driven by media attention, which is more easily captured by the drama of conflict than by peace.

~ Roméo Dallaire

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.

~ Roméo Dallaire

Are all humans human? Or are some more human than others?

~ Roméo Dallaire