Quotes About Somalia

#1. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras. I got to fully experience and appreciate both the tragedy of Somalia and the beauty of it.

K'naan

#2. Bin Laden was very keen to point out to me that his forces had fought the Americans in Somalia. He also wanted to talk about how many mullahs in Pakistan were putting up posters saying, "We follow bin Laden." He even produced a sort of Kodak set of snapshots of graffiti supporting him.

Robert Fisk

#3. A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home.

Charles Krauthammer

#4. Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.

P. J. O'Rourke

#5. I don't have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it's not realistic to daydream about it.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#6. Somalia is very dangerous, and no one knows that better than I.

Amanda Lindhout

#7. We should teach the foreigners and colonialists that Somalia cannot be led by other people and that the traitors who fled the country will never lead Somalia.

Siad Barre

#8. I couldn't be happier teaming up to make the feature with a company as innovative as VICE. There is so much the world doesn't know about piracy in Somalia and the people involved, and I'm excited to be telling a story of piracy in Somalia from a different perspective.

Cutter Hodierne

#9. Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.

Amartya Sen

#10. My mother was an activist; so was my father. They came from a generation of young Somalis who were actively involved in getting independence for Somalia in 1960.

Iman

#11. An oversupply of national sentiment is not the problem in Somalia. The problem is a lack of it. The problem is an oversupply of sub-sub-clannish attitude.

Meles Zenawi

#12. You know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his [about Muslims in Somalia]. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.

William G. Boykin

#13. When I leave Somalia I will leave buildings but not people.

Siad Barre

#14. The U.S. has taken an active role in wars from Libya to the Central African Republic, sent special ops forces into countries from Somalia to South Sudan, conducted airstrikes and abduction missions, even put boots on the ground in countries where it pledged it would not.

Nick Turse

#15. I think now Somalia is turning a corner and we can, with the new political development, build on momentum - really build a peaceful future.

Jan Egeland

#16. Our assistance in Somalia has been remarkably effective and successful, and we have helped with very small resources - a large group of people and we can now do even more.

Jan Egeland

#17. The same men who are placing all these outrageous restrictions on women's freedoms in southern Somalia - that type of mentality - that's what I had to deal with in captivity.

Amanda Lindhout

#18. I started to work on a feature-length script about pirates in Somalia, but I knew that there was something I was missing, which was that I didn't know what day-to-day life looked like and felt like in East Africa. So I decided I had to go.

Cutter Hodierne

#19. When an international news organization covers a story in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan or wherever, they will fly a crew to go there, spend a few days, interact with some officials and analysts, most of the time English-speaking elite, and file the story and go home.

Wadah Khanfar

#20. Going into Somalia, I didn't anticipate how many people's lives would be affected by it. In hindsight, I certainly wish I had taken more time to think about that, but I can't change it.

Amanda Lindhout

#21. I come from Somalia. We start working young, and we understand that kind of life. I would be bored to death not doing anything creative.

Iman Abdulmajid

#22. The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

Diane Ackerman

#23. If we look at Somalia, Ethiopia and Lybia, to how they're reduced now, and to how they were before, with Italy, I think that this page of history will be rewritten and there will be a positive evaluation of the role of Italy

Gianfranco Fini

#24. We women in Somalia are trying to be leaders in our community.

Hawa Abdi

#25. The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.

K'naan

#26. For the security of the UK, it matters a lot for Somalia to become a more stable place.

William Hague

#27. Finally, I also come in recognition of the great work that has been undertaken by the NGOs and UN agencies that have been active for many years here, especially through the local staff and international staff here in Somaliland and in Somalia at large.

Jan Egeland

#28. The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

#29. If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.

Nick Hanauer

#30. What happened to me in Somalia doesn't define me.

Amanda Lindhout

#31. Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow.

Barack Obama

#32. There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to. In

Yuval Noah Harari

#33. It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.

Amanda Lindhout

#34. Kelly, there are people in Somalia who would die for a banana.

Jack Osbourne

#35. Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

Richard Leakey

#36. I left Somalia when I was seven years old, but I witnessed a whole year in a war.

Barkhad Abdi

#37. The terrorism from 9/11 has metastasized. It's metastasized in Iraq and Syria, in Nigeria, in Somalia, in Yemen and in other places in North Africa. We need a very comprehensive strategy to deal with that threat.

Leon Panetta

#38. The experience of Somalia shows that famine in the late 20th century is not a consequence of a shortage of food. On the contrary, famines are spurred on as result of a global oversupply of grain staples.

Michel Chossudovsky

#39. We certainly would be happy for more help, but not at the price of condescension and arrogance. If the Europeans believe they can afford to be less committed in Somalia, please - we can deal with it ourselves.

Yoweri Museveni

#40. I think the biggest challenge for Somalia has been the sense that it is a hopeless case of incomprehensible internal conflicts and there is nothing we can do.

Jan Egeland

#41. [Somali maritime violence] is a response to greedy Western nations, who invade and exploit Somalia's water resources illegally. It is not a piracy, it is self defence. It is defending the Somalia children's food.

Muammar Al-Gaddafi

#42. The criteria, for me, is movie star. It's Hollywood. Not Somalia.

Steven Cojocaru

#43. African history is filled with experiences of people shooting their way to power and then splintering into factions, like in Somalia and Liberia.

George Ayittey

#44. A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.

Amanda Lindhout

#45. Accompanied by an Australian photographer named Nigel Brennan, I'd gone to Somalia to work as a freelance journalist, on a trip that was meant to last only ten days.

Amanda Lindhout

#46. I don't recognize my people anymore. I feel Somalia is lost. There is no Somalia. It is just a name.

Hawa Abdi

#47. I made a vow to myself while I was a hostage that if I were lucky enough to live and to get out of Somalia, I would do something meaningful with my life - and specifically something that would be meaningful in the country where I'd lost my freedom.

Amanda Lindhout

#48. I was born in Somalia, which is in East Africa. My parents started with nothing: poor, poor, poor. They eloped, which was unheard of in my country, when my father was 17 and my mother was 14.

Iman

#49. We're going to take out seven countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran

Wesley Clark

#50. The really disturbing thing about Somalia is that in a country where there are few economic opportunities, pirates are perceived as glamorous and are held in awe by young boys who aspire to their lifestyle.

Wilbur Smith

#51. Freelancing in Somalia during their civil war and in Kuwait right after the first Bush War, I had some rather intense experiences that made life in the U.S. seem rather shallow and superfluous.

Peter Menzel

#52. Death in Somalia seldom bothers to announce its arrival. In fact, death calls with the arrogance of a guest confident on receiving a warm welcome at any time, no question asked.

Nuruddin Farah

#53. All we hear about Africa in the West is Darfur, Zimbabwe, Congo, Somalia, as if that is all there is.

Mo Ibrahim

#54. The long-term solution in preventing another famine in Somalia is to promote self-reliance.

Hawa Abdi

#55. With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?

Tim Ferriss

#56. The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.

Jared Diamond

#57. For many people in the U.N., the 1990s was the worst decade the organization experienced. This was the decade of Somalia, Srebrenica, of Rwanda and so forth, and yet the reality is, during this period, although there were these awful conflicts, the overall number of wars had gone down.

Andrew Mack

#58. It was not lost on Osama bin Laden that it only took 18 dead in Somalia for the Great Satan to pull out. It should not be lost on Americans that this is what the Democrats are again demanding we do in Iraq.

Ann Coulter

#59. The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti.

Stan Goff

#60. 5 Fieldworker life expectancy: 49 years. Antonio Velasco, M.D., Farm Workers in the 1990s. Forty-nine is akin to Somalia (United Nations report) and thirty years less than in the U.S. (CIA World Factbook, 2008). Camels and catfish live longer.

David Marin

#61. You need the will to disarm the civilian population. If we can do it in Somalia, we can do it here.

Mary McGrory

#62. Somalia is an important story in the world, and it needed to be told.

Amanda Lindhout

#63. What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people's instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can't distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia.

Susan Meiselas

#64. We grew up as poor people but we never knew poverty. I still love and miss the Somalia I grew up in. Things changed, when my father became a diplomat later on.

Iman Abdulmajid

#65. When we think about millions of hungry children, we don't think about America. We relate the problem to other nations, like Ethiopia, India or Somalia. The sad truth is that one is five American kids is at risk due to poor nutrition.

Kristin Davis

#66. I never have my CNN off, it's on the whole day. I don't want to be out of range of television. I'm constantly bombarded by information - Somalia one second, Haiti the next - I need that constant pounding. I couldn't write without television. I need to have the world in my room.

Bharati Mukherjee

#67. People feel repressed by their own governments; they feel unfairly treated by the outside world; they wake up in the morning, and who do they see - they see people being shot and killed: all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#68. Somaliland and Somalia at large have been receiving now hundreds of thousands of returnees that they had to accommodate with very small resources.

Jan Egeland

#69. What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat.

David Cameron

#70. Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

Amanda Lindhout

#71. Whatever happens in Mogadishu, in Somalia, will happen in Great Britain. We have interlocking interests.

William Hague

#72. I want people to know there is more to Somalia than looting and piracy.

Michael Palin

#73. I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#74. It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed.

K'naan

#75. I grew up in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, and in Kenya. I came to Europe in 1992, when I was 22, and became a member of Parliament in Holland.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#76. I have big hope for the Canadian government to help Somalia with something concrete and tangible. I haven't seen that.

Hawa Abdi

#77. The U.S., often in secret, carries out counterterrorism missions all the time, with drones in places like Yemen and Somalia.

Richard Engel

#78. As their figures recede, it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight.

Nadifa Mohamed

#79. Love will cost you dearly.
And it will break your heart.
But in the end, it will save the world.

Sarah Thebarge

#80. Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

Nadifa Mohamed

#81. In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.

Nadifa Mohamed