BONO

BONO ON PREACHING
"Yesterday morning, the rock star ended up in a Methodist pulpit...I wanted to bang my fist like those fire brimstone preachers I've seen on the TV but I didn't need to -- this congregation seemed to already know that the AIDS emergency is the defining moral issue of our time...I ended up listening to them."
--Bono's diary

BONO ON BILL HYBELS
"On my way to the great canyons of glass and steel that make up Chicago's skyline, we stop at Willow Creek Church. Reverend Hybels and his wife Lynne sit me down and lift me up at the same time. I can't explain it exactly. I didn't have to explain to them that I wasn't coming calling with a cause, we all have plenty of them. 6,500 people in Africa died today of AIDS. This is an emergency."
--Bono's diary

BONO ON WHEATON
"Last night we preached the Gospel (literally) at Wheaton College where they grow preachers like Billy Graham (well, there's no one like Billy Graham). Anyway, I reminded them they had also produced Wes Craven. First they scare you, then they tell you where to turn. Not just because they laughed at my joke, I really loved this crowd. These are the loudest Christians in the world. Normally I'm not comfortable with church people, they're pious, they're judgmental. These young students gave me hope. I quoted C.S. Lewis (they have all his letters in the library here): "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date." And his other one: "the stage is but a platform shoe"...that was my other joke. I knew they would think I was smaller in real life, I told them I'm also much better looking."
--Bono's diary

BONO TO WHEATON
"You didn't start it. But you can end it. We need your help. Let's rock and roll."
--Bono to Wheaton College students, encouraging them to fight AIDS in Africa

BONO ON JESUS
"That there's a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in s--- and straw and poverty, is genius. And brings me to my knees, literally. Christ's example is being demeaned by the church if they ignore the new leprosy, which is AIDS. The church is the sleeping giant here. If it wakes up to what's really going on in the rest of the world, it has a real role to play. If it doesn't, it will be irrelevant."
--Bono in the Chicago Sun-Times

BONO ON FAITH
"I don't doubt God. I have firm faith absolutely in God. It's religion I'm doubting."
--Bono on Larry King

BONO ON EVIL
BONO: What makes man evil?…I think -- I mean, if you ask a big question like that, and you have to look into -- you have to be responsible and to follow those questions through to the people and study the people who have asked them over eons, over centuries. And you get to the great books of wisdom, and you get to the scriptures, in my case. And you know, I've -- listen, I am the worst -- I am at the very bottom of the list of the food chain of -- you know, I sort of need to practice a whole lot more Christian. But...
LARRY KING: ... Christian.
BONO: That's what I hold onto.
KING: We're back with Bono. You mentioned being Christian, and...
BONO: Trying to be.
KING: ... trying to be. Are you -- do you like organized religion? Are you a Catholic? Do you go to mass?
BONO: Who in Ireland could have too much respect for organized religion? We've seen it tear our country in two. My mother was a Protestant. My father was a Catholic. And I learned that religion is often the enemy of God, actually. And religion is this sort of -- religion is the artifice, you know, the building, after God has left it sometimes, like Elvis has left the building. You hold onto religion, you know, rules, regulations, traditions. I think what God is interested in is people's hearts, and that's hard enough.
KING: So, especially in Ireland, you've seen it fail.
BONO: Yes, yes. And now, we're watching it around the world. We're watching what religion can do. And you know, I think it's anathema, and see -- religion takes ideas. Religion often reduces the size of God. 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.
KING: And so, we raise money in his name and go to war in his name.…If there is a God, he must be angry at a lot of this.
BONO: I think God is very angry at the moment, and I think there is -- I think it's shocking what is going on in the world. And I think it is an extraordinary moment. Right now, I can tell you this. Our age will be remembered. This moment in time will be remembered for three things: the war against terror, sure; the Internet, probably; and how we let an entire continent, Africa, burst into flames and stood around with water in cans. This is not acceptable. It is not acceptable to let people die because they can't get the drugs that you and I take for granted. That means -- you have to ask very hard questions of ourselves if we're doing that.
--Bono on Larry King, December 1

BONO ON FATHERHOOD
"A lot of people thought having kids would chill me out. Far from it. I got more intense in a lot of ways about the way I saw the world, my determination to get to grips with it. It's the lengths you would go to protect your children. My pacifism, my hallmark in the 1980s, was challenged by having children. I try to channel that into activism."
--Bono in Rolling Stone

BONO ON THE MAN IN BLACK
"Not since John the Baptist has there been a voice like that crying in the wilderness. Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash."
--Bono from the liner notes of "The Essential Johnny Cash"

BONO ON CASH
"Johnny Cash doesn't sing to the damned, he sings with the damned, and sometimes you feel he may prefer their company."
--Bono from the liner notes of Cash's "Love, God, Murder"

BONO ON FAITH TALK
"I don't talk about my faith very much, because the people you might want to talk with, you don't want to hang out with.

"To have faith in a time of religious fervor is a worry. And, you know, I do have faith, and I'm worried about even the subject because of the sort of fanaticism that is the next-door neighbor of faith. The trick in the next few years will be not to decry the religious instinct, but to accept that this is a hugely important part of people's lives. And at the same time to be very wary of people who believe that theirs is the only way. Unilateralism before God is dangerous."

"Religion is ceremony and symbolism. Writers live off symbolism, and performers live off ceremony. We're made for religion! And yet you see this country, Ireland, ripped over religion, and you see the Middle East. Right now, unless tolerance comes with fervor, you'll see it in the United States."
--Bono in The New York Times

BONO ON AIDS
"Look, if you see a car crash, somebody's lying there in the middle of the road bleeding and it turns out they're a drunk driver, you're still going to call an ambulance. We can't make these judgments about entire civilizations. We try to re-educate people, we try to deal with the problem. And by the way, not dealing with the problem with something like AIDS, which metastasized, which grows on a geometric level, is really foolhardy. Because it will be more expensive to deal with it later. "
--Bono interviewed by Bill O'Reilly

BONO ON AMAZING GRACE
"The story of 'Amazing Grace' is just that: a gospel song without any of the big grinning cheesiness often found in that genre. As a musician I am often struck by the phrase 'sweet the sound' in Amazing Grace. I love to think that music can be an instrument of grace, that there might be mercy in melody and that at the very least a great song can fill the silence of indifference we sometimes find in our hearts."
--Bono on Steve Turner's Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song (Ecco)

BONO ON FAITH
"Well, you know, I am not a very good advertisement for God. So, I generally don't wear that badge on my lapel. But it is certainly written on the inside. I am a believer. There are 2,103 verses of Scripture pertaining to the poor. Jesus Christ only speaks of judgement once. It is not all about the things that the church bangs on about. It is not about sexual immorality, and it is not about megalomania, or vanity. It is about the poor. 'I was naked you clothed me. I was a stranger and you let me in.' This is at the heart of the gospel. Why is it that we have seemed to have forgotten this? Why isn't the church leading this movement? I am here tonight because the church ought to be ready to do that.
--Bono in response to Thunderstruck's question about how faith motivates his activism, asked during a press conference at Northeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky

BONO ON F-WORD
"I guess I don't speak American, but I thought I did. There are some obscenities in our culture, and this is nowhere near the top of the list. I never meant to be offensive. That language was genuine exuberance. It was a great moment for our band. If you're Irish, you love language, and if you do, you're going to fall on the occasional expletive; it's the percussive side of language. For me, it is preposterous to have good, conservative people whom I like and respect taking on an expletive while the right to pack heavy ammo goes by. It says something eloquent, if not pretty, about where we are."
--Bono in the New York Times regarding his use of the "F" word

BONO ON THE CHURCH
"We will be back next year and you'll be hearing from me. You'll be hearing from the sleeping giant that is the church. I mean, what is going on with the churches? It is incredible. I tell these evangelicals in the United States there are 2,300 verses of scripture about the poor. It's the central message outside of personal redemption, the idea of dealing with the poor. And I'm asking them, where are they? Where are they on this? On a recent poll of evangelical churches, only six per cent said they wanted to do something about AIDS. It is unbelievable, the leprosy of our time if you like. But it's starting to turn; the Church is starting to wake up."
--Bono on debt relief on CBC News

BONO ON FAITH
"I find solace in places I never could have imagined: the quiet sprinkling of my child's head in Baptism, a gospel choir drunk on the Holy Spirit in Memphis, or the back of a catherdral in Rome watching the first cinematographers play with light and colour in stained glass stories of the Passion. I am still amazed at how big, how enormous the love and mystery of God is -- and how small are the minds that attempt to corral this life force into rules and taboos, cults, and sects."
--Bono, from the forward of Adam Harbinson's "They've Hijacked God"

BONO ON WORSHIP
"I believe being a worship leader is the highest of all art forms, to worship and call people into the presence of God."
-- Bono, discussing Christian and secular music with a group of reporters after the National Prayer Breakfast

BONO ON FAITH
"Q: Money. Irishness. God. Which one couldn't you live without?
Bono: Wow. Well it's an easy question to ask but... here's a thing. When I was 16, my head was exploding. I just felt my life was going nowhere. I didn't fit in. I couldn't get a job. I didn't know how I could do my exams and I wasn't even sure I could concentrate at college. In those days, I remember, a prayer came up inside me. I said "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life but if there's a God out there, and I believe there is, and You want me to do something, then I'm ready. I don't have any plans for myself and I'm available for work." Pretty much within a few months of that epiphany I had joined U2 and started going out with Ali. A pretty good two months! Now had my destiny been -- if the God in heaven had said I want you to become a fireman and run up very dangerous buildings and save people's pets, I'd like to hope I'd have gone at it with the same gusto. So -- I couldn't let go of my faith. But what's more interesting is that I don't think God will let go of me. I love it when people on bar stools rub their chins and say do you believe in God? That's so presumptuous. A much more important question is does God believe in us?
Q: That sounds like you believe you were chosen.
Bono: No, no, no, I don't believe that. I do think God gets a laugh out of using some very poor materials. I volunteered is what I'm telling you."
--Bono in Q Magazine

BONO ON BILLY GRAHAM
"At a time when religion seems so often to get in the way of God's work -- with its shopping mall sales pitch and its bumpersticker reductionism -- I give thanks just for the sanity of Billy Graham, for that clear, empathetic voice of his in that Southern accent. Part poet, part preacher -- a singer of the human spirit. Yeah, I give thanks for Billy Graham. Thanks Billy Graham."
--Bono on Pat Boone's new video tribute to Billy Graham

BONO ON SONG
"But if a show is a little off, and there's a hole, that's the one song we can guarantee that God will walk through the room as soon as we play it. So the idea that when we played it, people would go, `That's the such-and-such commercial,' we couldn't live with it."
--Bono on why U2 refused £12.5 million to allow "Where the Streets have No Name" for a commercial

BONO ON FAITH
"Coolness might help in your negotiation with people through the world, maybe, but it is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on. It is impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, being raw. That’s the connection with great music and art, and that is why it’s uncomfortable, that is why cool is the enemy of it, because that's the other reason you wanted to join a band: you wanted to do the cool thing. Trying to capture religious experiences on tape wasn’t what you had in mind when you signed up for the job." --Bono in Bono in conversation with Michka Assayas

BONO ON SELF
"I'm a scribbling, cigar-smoking, wine-drinking, Bible-reading band man. A show off (laughs)...who loves to paint pictures of what I can't see. A husband, father, friend of the poor and sometimes the rich. An activist traveling salesman of ideas...Chess-player, part-time rock star, opera singer, in the loudest folk group in the world..."
--Bono's self description in Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas