Romeo Dallaire

“If I decide to make a career in the army, he said, I would never be rich, but I would live one of the most satisfying lives there was to be had. Thenhe warned me that satisfaction would come at a great cost to me and any family I might have. I should never expected to be thanked; a soldier, if he was going to be content, had to understand that no civilian, no government,sometimes not even the army itself, would recognize the true nature of the scarifies he made.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Though many desperately and relentlessly cling to old, divisive ideas in the face of a future that looks complex and uncertain, no one can legitimately portray themselves as members or practitioners of the one true faith, the superior race, the best culture. No one can say, with the image of the blue and green Earth floating in their heads, that others don't count as much as "we" do, that others don't hold the same status as we do, are not as significant as us, are ultimately just not as human as us.”

“Peux ce que veux. Allons-y.”

“How do we pick and choose where to get involved? Canada and other peacekeeping nations have become accustomed to acting if, and only if, international public opinion will support them - a dangerous path that leads to a moral relativism in which a country risks losing sight of the difference between good and evil, a concept that some players on the international stage view as outmoded. Some governments regard the use of force itself as the greatest evil. Others define "good" as the pursuit of human rights and will opt to employ force when human rights are violated. As the nineties drew to a close and the new millennium dawned with no sign of an end to these ugly little wars, it was as if each troubling conflict we were faced with had to pass the test of whether we could "care" about it or "identify" with the victims before we'd get involved.”

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

“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.”

“Is the human condition not defined by an endless struggle to control the ego's subterfuges?”

“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.”