Bob Geldof Quotes

When I hit 11 so did the careers of Dylan and the Stones. A year later it was the Who and the Kinks.

When Michael Jackson sings it is with the voice of angels, and when his feet move, you can see God dancing.

It strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that people die of want in a world of surplus.

Mankind at its most desperate is often at its best

You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.

Physically I'm tired at the end of the day and quite glad to be reading in bed by midnight

And whereas women had to fight to find their way into the workforce, men are now fighting to reclaim their place in the family structure.

Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American President for Africa. But it's empirically so.

We're looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition... doesn't matter if it's death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty. Our problem is that everybody tries to heal each of the individual aspects of poverty, not poverty itself.

There is not a single extant study that supports all the arguments against men being with their children. It's absolute bollocks

Feed the world. Let them know it's Christmas time again.

It's really very simple, Governor. When people are hungry they die. So spare me your politics and tell me what you need and how you're going to get it to these people.

Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.

It's like you asked me about the depression thing: you grope towards an understanding of whatever it is your going through, and it's not personal, there are forces in play around you, and you seek to understand them and that way you can go on

Well, a sort of epiphany: I was in a great band. And it's very cool to be at 53 and realise that when you were a kid you were in a great band.

Rock & roll is instant coffee.

And part of that is, what is the point of having children if you don't have the privilege of bringing them up?

I don't think anyone sets out to malign poor people but certainly that's what we do through organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

It went beyond idealism and that ridiculous term "activism," which basically means talking about something but doing nothing. . . . We made giving exciting.

Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I'm Bob and I'm an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.

Certainly, I think being depressed is absolutely part of the human condition, it has to be, if there's joy there's its opposite, and it's something you ride if you possibly can.

Music can't change the world.

But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc.

Blair has called Africa 'a scar on our conscience'. It is more. It is the gaping wound of the world's soul.

Divorce is a by-product of the fact that maybe the nuclear unit is gone.

You'll think I'm off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical - in a positive sense - in its approach to Africa since Kennedy.

So when I got to 50 I just thought, Hold on: I'm thin. I've got my hair. I'm well off. I survived, you know

But I think Prozac is a lethal drug, I've several friends just haven't made it by taking Prozac.

If you were a pretty boy pop singer, it would wreck you, growing older

Men who are not given any voice in this because of the secret nature of the courts, what they're left with is dressing up ridiculously, but at least using humour to try and draw attention to their kids

I do think I feel it but you don't think you are cause at a certain time you are no age but you don't think you are anything. You feel the life you have lived. I feel that. It's been a long fifty years.

Most people get into bands for three very simple rock and roll reasons: to get laid, to get fame, and to get rich.

Tell me why...... I don't like Mondays.

90% of the divorces are initiated by women. That is really odd. Why? What's going on? What's the great discontent at the heart of it?

I was really lucky that I came to puberty at a time when music and politics were completely intertwined

Everything that's rock n roll is ever meant to be is happening now. I need to get over the shock that that thing is actually happening and that thousands of millions of people around the world are watching.

Bono as we all know, is in love with the world, he's enamoured by it. I'm enraged by it. He wants to give the world a great big hug, I want to punch its lights out.

Playing live if the thing I love doing best

Think. That's what we need you to do. Think.

Music is what I must do, business is what I need to do and politics is what I have to do

I'm sure I'm very difficult to live with because of my make-up and personality.

What's the point in having a company of secretaries?

They thought they were Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. In fact, they were more like Tom and Jerry

Rock and Roll is instant coffee.

It's a tragedy that modernity has released this Ebola beast into the world. It renders humans untouchable, and that's sickening. The international response so far has been scandalous. China has delivered f**k all.

Because we can't comprehend it, and that's what allows us to do it again. And it is the normal, it's the average person that can do this. Again, in an imaginary other universe, maybe we'd have done it. That's the terrible truth that lies at the heart of each of us; that imponderable, 'were I not Jewish, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, would I have gone down on the other side?'

I'd always thought the Rats were good fun, but one of the very nice things about being of Saga age is that I can actually look back and think, When I was younger I was in a great band. It was always a collective thing.

You cannot even begin to understand contemporary African politics if you have not read this fascinating book

Find inner peace? I looked; it wasn't there.

Music is still above all else the thing that does it for me