Amin Quotes

#1. I came from here, you came from there.
And now we're both sitting at the same table.

Amin Maalouf

#2. Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#3. Are you certain that a man's life begins with his birth?

Amin Maalouf

#4. By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.

Amin Maalouf

#5. The problem with me is that I am fifty or one hundred years ahead of my time. My speed is very fast. Some ministers have had to drop out of my government because they could not keep up.

Idi Amin

#6. Some women's arms are placed of exile; others are a native land.

Amin Maalouf

#7. There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech

Idi Amin

#8. All pleasures must be paid for, do not despise those that state their price.

Amin Maalouf

#9. I certainly don' think I could've played the character [Idi Amin] the same way without being in Uganda. I loved working in Uganda.

Forest Whitaker

#10. Virtue becomes unhealthy if it is not softened by some misdemeanors, and faith quickly becomes cruel if is not subdued by certain doubts.

Amin Maalouf

#11. The truth is rarely buried; it is merely lying in wait behind veils of modesty, pain, or indifference; the one necessary prerequisite is a passionate desire to lift the veils.

Amin Maalouf

#12. I have the profoundest respect for people who behave in a generous way because of religion. But I come from a country where the misuse of religion has had catastrophic consequences. One must judge people not by what faith they proclaim but by what they do.

Amin Maalouf

#13. At my age, only naivete still manages to scandalize me sometimes.

Amin Maalouf

#14. Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?

Amin Maalouf

#15. I want to be remembered as a great athlete. As a boxing champion.

Idi Amin

#16. The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.

Amin Maalouf

#17. If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.

Idi Amin

#18. What's a year in comparison with eternity? what's a day? an hour? a second? Such measures have meaning only for a heart that's still beating.

Amin Maalouf

#19. Prison was tough on me. I saw people in prison that made me ashamed I was a human being. Some make Qaddafi and Idi Amin look like Sunday-school teachers.

Evel Knievel

#20. His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.

Idi Amin

#21. The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

Amin Maalouf

#22. I am the son of the road , my country is a caravan and my life is the most unexpected of voyages. i belong to earth and to the god and it is to them that I will one day soon return

Amin Maalouf

#23. In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.

Idi Amin

#24. We are not just visitors on this planet, it belongs to us just as we belong to her, its past is ours, so is its future.

Amin Maalouf

#25. You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

Nadine Gordimer

#26. Don't be so timid! When you were a child, didn't you speak out the truth that the oldest ones kept secret? Well, you were right then. You must find the time of innocence in yourself again, because that was also the time of courage.

Amin Maalouf

#27. I think the place fed me completely. Not only was I in Uganda, but I was around many people who had a personal relationship with Idi Amin. I was eating the food constantly. I was culturally hanging out with the people. You can't help but absorb the energy, and try to get inside the culture.

Forest Whitaker

#28. What strange times we live in, when good must disguise itself in the tawdry rags of evil!

Amin Maalouf

#29. No king establishes a kingdom without pouring blood of a nation.

Auliq Ice

#30. What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself

Amin Maalouf

#31. Although some people felt Adolf Hitler was bad, he was a great man and a real conqueror whose name would never be forgotten.

Idi Amin

#32. Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.

Amin Maalouf

#33. I am the hero of Africa.

Idi Amin

#34. Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

Idi Amin

#35. I love the Americans. They are my best friends.

Idi Amin

#36. I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that will be distributed equally throughout the world.

Idi Amin

#37. It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in.

Amin Maalouf

#38. Some women's arms are places of exile; others are a native land.

Amin Maalouf

#39. A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Amin Maalouf

#40. It's not often in life that you can misbehave for the good of the cause

Amin Maalouf

#41. When a man is rich, whether in gold or in knowledge, he must treat the poverty of others with consideration.

Amin Maalouf

#42. I have to keep law and order and it means that I have to kill my enemies before they kill me.

Idi Amin

#43. Amin knew that neither West nor East would criticize him for fear that he would support the other side. He felt he was untouchable and he said so openly.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#44. Good and evil has no passport; it speaks in different tongues, wears many skins, and exists everywhere, even in the same person

A.H. Amin

#45. Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

Elliott Abrams

#46. People always manage to 'prove' what they want to believe; they'd be just as well off if they tried to prove the opposite.

Amin Maalouf

#47. Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.

Haj Amin Al-Husseini

#48. Since Idi Amin was from the Sudanese section in the north of Uganda, he was darker skinned. He had more of a blue undertone. So, we did change the coloring of my skin to be closer to his. But otherwise, there were no transformations besides acting.

Forest Whitaker

#49. Our ancestors are our children; we peer through a hole in the wall and watch them play in their rooms, and they can't see us.

Amin Maalouf

#50. I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all.

Haj Amin Al-Husseini

#51. America has had to deal with eccentric dictators in the past: Idi Amin, Muammar Qaddafi, Ming the Merciless ... but now the security of the world is threatened by Kim Jong-il, a nerdy, pompadoured, platform shoe-wearer who looks like something you'd put on the end of your child's pencil.

Jon Stewart

#52. Amin managed to invite both the US and Soviet ambassadors to his palace at the very same time and then deliberately kept them together in his waiting room.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#53. It's the camel's nose in the tent. Look at Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin
every one of these monsters, on seizing power, their first act was to confiscate all firearms in private hands ...

Charlton Heston

#54. It's not for me. I tried human flesh and it's too salty for my taste.

Idi Amin

#55. Perhaps writing only arouses the passions in order to allay them, as beaters flush out the game in order to expose it to the hunter's arrows.

Amin Maalouf

#56. I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can't be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn't prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.

Amin Maalouf

#57. There are people [in Uganda] who hate Idi Amin, a small amount. And then there are the people who really admire him, like a hero. And then there's a large group who say, 'We know that all these murders and atrocities occurred, but he did all these great things.'

Forest Whitaker

#58. The pursuit of origins is a way of rescuing territory from death and oblivion, a reconquest that ought to be patient, devoted, relentless and faithful.

Amin Maalouf

#59. Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

Amin Maalouf

#60. If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down.

Jamil Al-Amin

#61. We die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.

Amin Maalouf

#62. I started by studying Kiswahili to learn the dialect. Then, I studied tapes, documentaries, footage, and audio cassettes of Idi Amin's speeches. And I met with his brothers, his sisters, his ministers, his generals' all kinds of people, in order to try to understand him.

Forest Whitaker

#63. Because I was playing Idi Amin, who dealt with the colonisation issue, I became aware of this internalised conflict of what it means to be torn between cultures, what it means to be taken over by other cultures.

Forest Whitaker

#64. It was him taught Idi Amin's lads how to extract voluntary confessions with the aid of an electric cattle-prod. Our chum likes them English and he likes them with a dirty past. He

John Le Carre

#65. You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you'll understand quite a lot.

Amin Maalouf

#66. When faced with a chaotic and convoluted situation, one always thinks that it will take centuries to sort it out. Suddenly a man appears and as if by magic, the tree we thought was doomed takes on new life and starts bearing leaves and fruits and giving shade. (Shireen in Samarkand)

Amin Maalouf

#67. I look at the world and my own life as if I were a stranger. I wish for nothing, except perhaps that time would stop.

Amin Maalouf

#68. Amin, you're not making sense to me. Things have always been this way, since the beginning of time. Some die so others can be saved. You don't believe in the salvation of others?

Yasmina Khadra

#69. You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

Amin Maalouf

#70. Clawing its way towards us, the ugliness of the world tore away our hiding-place.

Amin Maalouf

#71. Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices

Amin Maalouf

#72. Politics is like boxing - you try to knock out your opponents.

Idi Amin

#73. You cannot run faster than a bullet

Idi Amin

#74. I have always thought that Heaven invented all the problems, and Hell the solutions.

Amin Maalouf

#75. As an artist, it's a great opportunity to play a character like this [Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland]. And then, as a person, I had never been to the African continent. So, I knew, personally, it would reshape me.

Forest Whitaker

#76. Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.

Amin Maalouf

#77. He killed his enemies because he was afraid they would kill him. Amin ordered entire tribes to be put to death, because he feared they would rebel.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#78. I was a good soldier in the British Army. I was born in a very, very poor family. And I enlisted to escape hunger. But my officers were Scottish and they loved me. The Scots are good, you know.

Idi Amin

#79. A community begins to fall apart the moment it agrees to abandon the weakest of its members.

Amin Maalouf

#80. Let your tears roll tonight, but tomorrow you will start the battle again. What defeats us, always, is just our own sorrow.

Amin Maalouf

#81. So I've become an exile without ever leaving my country.

Amin Maalouf

#82. The identity cannot be compartmentalized; it cannot be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I do not have several identities, I only have one, made of all the elements that have shaped its unique proportions.

Amin Maalouf

#83. During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

Amin Maalouf

#84. My name is Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown. I am a devoted servant of Allah, and an unwavering devotee to His cause. For more than 30 years, I have been tormented and persecuted by my enemies for reasons of race and belief.

H. Rap Brown

#85. Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#86. My mission is to lead the country out of a bad situation of corruption, depression and slavery. After I rid the country of these vices, I will then organize and supervise a general election of a genuinely democratic civilian government.

Idi Amin

#87. Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?

Amin Maalouf

#88. ...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.

Amin Maalouf

#89. I noticed long ago that Amin has the tendency to concentrate power in his own hands but I did not attach any particular significance to this. However, recently this tendency has become dangerous.

Nur Muhammad Taraki

#90. In my prayers, I want to say: Lord, don't be far from me, and also don't come too close. Let me contemplate the stars on the texture of your cloth, but don't unveil your face to me. Allow me to hear the rivers that you send running, but Lord! Lord! Don't allow me hearing your voice

Amin Maalouf

#91. I do not want to be controlled by any superpower. I myself consider myself the most powerful figure in the world, and that is why I do not let any superpower control me.

Idi Amin

#92. For it is often the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free.

Amin Maalouf

#93. Your experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in very high positions.

Idi Amin

#94. I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road ... all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them.

Amin Maalouf

#95. I'm a good Muslim and I'm only interested in Islam.

Idi Amin

#96. I myself consider myself the most powerful figure in the world.

Idi Amin

#97. Is there a difference between being the midwife of truth, or the midwife of legends?

Amin Maalouf

#98. God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.

Amin Maalouf

#99. He's passing the ball like Idi Amin.

Alan Parry

#100. Life is not so long that one can grow tired of it

Amin Maalouf