Bob Geldof
Bob Geldof
Robert Frederick Zenon "Bob" Geldof, KBE, is an Irish singer, songwriter, author, occasional actor, and political activist. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside the punk rock movement. The band had hits with his compositions "Rat Trap" and "I Don't Like Mondays". He co-wrote "Do They Know It's Christmas?", one of the best-selling singles of all time, and starred in Pink Floyd's 1982...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth5 October 1951
CityDun Laoghaire, Ireland
CountryIreland
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.
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.
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.
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.
It strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that people die of want in a world of surplus.
I'm sure I'm very difficult to live with because of my make-up and personality.
Music can't change the world.
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.
But I think Prozac is a lethal drug, I've several friends just haven't made it by taking Prozac.
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.
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?'
Blair has called Africa 'a scar on our conscience'. It is more. It is the gaping wound of the world's soul.
It went beyond idealism and that ridiculous term "activism," which basically means talking about something but doing nothing. . . . We made giving exciting.
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.