Kagame Quotes

Why are some countries able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot? These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear. Leadership is crucial, of course. Kagame was a strong leader–decisive, focused, disciplined, and honest–and he remains so today. I believe that sometimes people's characters are molded by their environment. Angola, like Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is resource-rich, a natural blessing that sometimes has the sad effect of diminishing the human drive for self-sufficiency, the ability and determination to maximize that which one has. Kagame had nothing. He grew up in a refugee camp, equipped with only his own strength of will and determination to create a better life for himself and his countrymen.

A pebble tossed from a beach can become a tsunami on the other side of the world. You are that pebble and I’m standing on a beach on the other side of time, waiting for the tidal wave to crash.

You kept quit... When these victims wanted your help to survive, you kept quit.

Listen more to the one who criticizes you and less to the one who praises you. Learn from them and do something about it.

We cannot turn the clock back nor can we undo the harm caused, but we have the power to determine the future and to ensure that what happened never happens again.

Kagame's Rwanda is the same Netanyahu's Israel we see today, both leaders are hiding behind the cloak of genocide while inflicting the same calamities upon their neighbours who welcomed them with open hands.

Anti-Semitism has become a motto and shield of oppression that Netanyahu and the Jewish people generally use; just like Kagame and the Tutsis practice in Rwanda.

President Kagame’s response to this crisis was unusual. Let them go, he decreed. First the elderly prisoners, in 1998. Then, in 2003, a mass release of 24,000 prisoners, including the terminally ill, those who had participated in the government confession program, those under fourteen during the genocide.

But President Kagame himself told me that when we have lived through their many genocides (1994 was actually but one in a long series), we will have the experience and the right to judge their genocide prevention policies.