Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most of us have made the mistake that after they crossed the Red Sea they spent 40 years in the wilderness fighting amongst each other.
I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.
I certainly know that I would not be able to survive if it were not for the fact that I am being upheld by the prayers of so many people.
I'm coming to believe more and more in the truth that everything we do has consequences. A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear.
Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin.
Oh, 1994, April 27. There won't be a day like that ever again. I mean, the sky was blue, with a blueness that had never been there before.
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.
As human beings, even if we were to have tried to forget the past, if you dealt with it in a cavalier fashion, it would return to haunt you.
Those of us who came to be Christians get to remember that forgiveness cost God the death of God's son. It's an expensive thing in many ways.
When we look at a conflict, it is so often rooted in injustice, prejudice, competition for resources, poverty, poor governance and corruption.
When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.
To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good.
We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black and white.
God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.
No one is self-sufficient. And it's not a one-way thing- -the generosity of spirit from one side provokes a response in kind from the other side.
The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.
Once you have women liberated, it's amazing how many other problems get resolved--pover ty, education, health. Women are the key in any community.
Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.
Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'
I hope that when the time comes, I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life's journey in the manner of my choice.
Don't raise your voice, improve your argument." [Address at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 November 2004]
Trust is one of the fundamentals of human existence. We need to be able to trust one another. A man who can no longer trust anyone will become sick.
You ask when is it that you can say yes we have had enough. It is enough revenge and I think now we have restored the equilibrium. It never happens!
I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.
God says, "Please, please help me realize this dream." And some of God's best collaborators are the young, because you dream. You dream God's dream.
Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.
Catharsis returns us to the purpose for which were originally intended - to be called by God to do good - and thus ultimately returns us to ourselves.
When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.
Naming a center after a person who is still alive can make it seem that an individual somehow on their own was able to accomplish what he accomplished.
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
Restorative justice says "No, the offense affected a relationship" and what you are seeking for is to restore the relationship, to heal the relationship.
We so desperately long for all of us to learn that we are meant for one another. We are meant for complementarity. The Syrians are members of our family.
It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. And never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.
All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.
When a pile of cups is tottering on the edge of the table and you warn that they will crash to the ground, in South Africa you are blamed when that happens.
There are very few institutions that give prizes to people who may not have got to be number one, but are possibly better at coaxing the best out of others.
People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation.
Each of us has a God-shaped space within us. Only God can fill that space. But we run ourselves ragged trying to find things other than God to fill it with.
The reprisal against the suicide bomber does not bring peace. There is a suicide bomber, a reprisal and then a counter-reprisal. And it just goes on and on.
Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.
We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew.
I think we need to grow in our self-assurance that is not scared of being challenged, that the truth we uphold can stand up to the closest possible scrutiny.
It was spine tingling, actually, when you saw how people kept saying, "Release Nelson Mandela," and meaning really, "Release all of our political prisoners."
I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now, so obviously wrong
I will never tell anyone to pick up a gun. But I will pray for the man who picks up a gun, pray that he will be less cruel than he might otherwise have been.
Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action.
We need to be accountable to God's family. Once we start living in a way that is people-friendly to all of God's family, we will also be environment-friendly.
The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.
Our Christian faith is actually very subversive of the conventional notion of success - the notion that what invests a person with worth is something extrinsic.
If you are invisible, you are vulnerable. Birth Registration must be everyone's priority. Let's make all children visible and let's give every child a birthday!