Bono quotes:

Because I was suspicious of the traditional Christian church, I tended to tar them all with the same brush. That was a mistake, because there are righteous people working in a whole rainbow of belief systems - from Hasidic Jews to right-wing Bible Belters to charismatic Catholics.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

Mandela's heroism is the heroism of a man who suffered so badly for what he thought of as freedom. And yet when he had the upper hand he has this incredible self-control and these incredible leadership qualities.

But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable.

When you align yourself with God's purpose as described in the Scriptures, something special happens to your life.

When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God's eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can't un-see.

Jesus isn't lettin' you off the hook. The Scriptures don't let you off the hook so easily... When people say, you know, 'Good teacher', 'Prophet', 'Really nice guy' ... this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn't it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, 'Would you take my son with you?' He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

Overcoming my dad telling me that I could never amount to anything is what has made me the megalomaniac that you see today.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We're standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did - or did not do - to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.

So you cannot, as a Christian, walk away from Africa.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

Rock music is niche.

Facebook are an amazing team, a brilliant team. It's a technology that brings people together.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays... and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist.

Rock 'n' roll is ridiculous. It's absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

What really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution - this revolution - is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this.

It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

It's annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

The only person who ever called me Paul was my father, so I always associate it with doing something wrong, you know. So, you know, occasionally, people will come up to me on the street and try to, you know, ingratiate themselves and call me Paul. I don't like it, actually.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

But there is a difference between cozying up to power and being close to power.

It's very important for Christians to be honest with God, which often, you know, God is much more interested in who you are than who you want to be.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don't read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2's audience.

Anyone that's involved in development has discovered that all the good work that's been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

It's so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

There's nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.

When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it's to be true and not cover up the cracks.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It's a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

The great gifts of models are not that they're more beautiful than the next person, it's that they're able to be photographed and not be self-conscious.

Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.

I wish to begin again on a daily basis. To be born again every day is something that I try to do. And I'm deadly serious about that.

Contrary to reports, this boy is not a billionaire or going to be richer than any Beatle... and not just in the sense of money, by the way; the Beatles are untouchable - those billionaire reports are a joke.

I love America and I hate it. I'm torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

It is impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, being raw.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

What I like about pop music, and why I'm still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music.

I'm never nervous when I go to meet heads of state. I feel they should be nervous, because they are the ones who'll be held accountable for the lives their decisions will impact the most.

You see, idealism detached from action is just a dream. But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit, is very exciting. It's very real. It's very strong.

Dream up the kind of world you want to live in. Dream out loud.

Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

It's quite widespread in rock culture, that mythology of the shooting star. I'd rather be the North star. As bob (Dylan) says, you can navigate by it.

God's Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm.

Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.

You know, God has some really weird kids, and I find it hard to be in their company most of the time.

David was "a star, the Elvis of the Bible." An unusually for such a rockstar with his lust for power, lust for women, lust for life, he had humility of one who knew his gift work harder than he ever would.

For all that "I was lost, I am found," it is probably more accurate to say, "I was really lost, I'm a little less so at the moment.

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world's poorest people.

It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

It's much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won't keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don't know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we've got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, 'Is this it? Are we still relevant?'

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.

The reason I'm attracted to the light of Scripture is because there's another side of me that is dark. The reason I am interested in men of peace is because I'm not like them and would like to be. I'm not someone in real life who turns the other cheek.

The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.

One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...

People who know our music, they know who you are. They've been in the dark room, they know you better than your best friend, because you don't sing like that to your best friend, you don't sing in their ear.

It's still very difficult for me to rely. Your weakness, the blessing of your weakness is it forces you into friendships. The things that you lack, you look for in others.

I'm home a lot. Because I live in Ireland, we can live under the celebrity radar. I might go missing for a whole year.

What's so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as they're being gospel and songs of praise, they are also the blues.

I believe that Jesus was, you know, the Son of God. And I understand that... we need to be really, really respectful to people who find that ridiculous and... preposterous.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

Where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world.

I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that's what makes them extraordinary.

It's not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That's why we're such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, 'Are people interested?' But I think our band has something and they know we don't just put albums out. We do think about it.

Convictions, in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass.

You've gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we're just nice, sort of 'death by cupcake.'

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we're a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn't being ironic.

I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.

When people say, you know, 'Good teacher,' 'Prophet,' 'Really nice guy'... this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you're left with a challenge in that, which is either Jesus was who he said he was or a complete and utter nut case. You have to make a choice on that.

I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

Sadly, I do my homework. I've a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I'll read C. Fred Bergsten's defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It's embarrassing to admit.

The extraction of oil, coal and minerals brought, and still brings, a cost to the environment.

If September 11th has taught us anything, it's certainly that the world has never been so interdependent. It is impossible now to be an island of prosperity in a sea of despair.

I'm a singer, not a politician, and I think you don't want the two to get confused. It's not OK to be on CNN talking about people starving and then tell the interviewer that your new album is coming out in six months.

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America.

Celebrity is ridiculous and silly and it's mad that people like me are listened to - you know, rap stars and movie stars.

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

Happy the country that lives on nothing but its wits; cursed be the one that thinks it can get rich by planting or digging or drilling for wealth.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don't know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Facts, like people, want to be free - and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

The less you know, the more you believe.

I don't let my religious world get too complicated.

America is not just a country, it's an idea, and real Americans are getting busy.

As hard as it is, as ghetto as it is, hip-hop is pop music. It's the sound of music getting out of the ghetto, while rock is looking for a ghetto.

Politeness is, you know, is a wonderful thing. Manners are in fact, really important thing. But remember, Jesus didn't have many manners as we now know.

In general people put too much faith in the rich, the famous, the politicians, and not enough faith in themselves.

Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.

The most powerful idea that's entered the world in the last few thousand years - the idea of grace - is the reason I would like to be a Christian.

Stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Find out what God's doing. It's already blessed.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad --- I see it in myself. I know what I'm capable of. Good and bad. It's very imnportant that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn't mean tjat I don't know it's there. (Bono)

We can't fix all problems but we must fix the ones we can

The French are so into themselves that they don't even notice you.

You don't become an 'artist' unless you've got something missing somewhere. Blaise Pascal called it a God-shaped hole. Everyone's got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It's a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one. You can never completely fill that hole-you can try with songs,family,faith and by living a full life...but when things are silent, you can still hear the hissing of what's missing.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.

In my view, the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience.