Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.
We give kudos to people who have succeeded. We don't care in what they succeeded as long as they succeeded. The worst thing that can happen to anybody in this cultural environment is to fail.
Suffering is part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble us. It can ennoble us and become a spirituality of transformation when we find meaning in it.
God could have created us to be automatons who were always choosing the right side, making the right decision. It is an incredible thing, God said "I want persons" who therefore have freedom.
In order to turn around and do something better, we must first escape the vicious circle of self-righteousness and denial. And that calls for the humility to say "I'm sorry. Please forgive me."
When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.
Is Zionism racism? I would say yes. It's a policy that to me looks like it has very many parallels with racism. The effect is the same. Whether you call it that or not is in a sense irrelevant.
The only separation the Bible knows is between believers on the one hand and unbelievers on the other. Any other kind of separation, division, disunity is of the devil. It is evil and from sin.
True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute.
I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.
Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, his will for us will prevail, love will prevail over hate, justice over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness.
Jesus could weep. Sometimes when you look at the ugliness that makes you weep, you know that the heart of God is also weeping. Jesus is for real. He does not give up on anyone, least of all on me.
Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity - or because of their sexual orientation.
My flock is black, my flock is white. One has got to say to our people, "I love you. I care for you, enormously." And when I care about black liberation, it is because I care about white liberation.
Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another, and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.
I'm so thankful a significant majority of Americans are saying no to military intervention. We've got to find a solution that will in the end be one that makes Syria a better country, a better people.
There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative allowing accountability to fall by the wayside is worse.
God looks at the Middle East, looks at Palestine. When you go to the Holy Land and see what's being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it's the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa.
Instead of separation and division, all distinctions make for a rich diversity to be celebrated for the sake of the unity that underlies them. We are different so that we can know our need of one another.
Even the worst dictator, there is not a single one of them who would say "Oh yes, I violate human rights." They all claim "oh no, we respect human rights" even when they are doing the most egregious things.
A jealous person is doubly unhappy-over what he has, which is judged inferior, and over which he has not, which is judged superior. Such a person is doubly removed from knowing the true blessing of creation.
Niger is not an isolated island of desperation. It lies within a sea of problems across Africa - particularly the 'forgotten emergencies' in poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal.
I don't often want to speak. I try to be a reasonable person and to be diplomatic, but you go to that place and you see the settlements, you see what has happened to the land that was owned by the Palestinians.
We used to say to the apartheid government: you may have the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come: join the winning side. His Holiness and the Tibetan people are on the winning side.
Twenty-five years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse. No more can it be dismissed as science fiction; we are already feeling the effects.
For both the offender and the victim, the pain is there, often unacknowledged and that is when it can cause harm through festering. When I ignore a physical wound, it does not go away. No, it festers and goes bad.
Whether you want to say Israel practices apartheid is immaterial. They are doing things, given their history, you think, "Do you remember what happened to you?" Then they clobber you and say, "You are anti-Semitic."
There are different kinds of justice. Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative - not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew.
I certainly don't think we [The Elders organization] are oracles but I would hope that over our lifetimes we have accumulated some useful experience and perhaps even a modicum of wisdom! We don't have all the answers.
The sad problem is that we see ourselves as being quite terribly small. Instead of spending my time being envious, I need to celebrate your and my different gifts, even if mine are perhaps less spectacular than yours.
In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is. Not how much we love Him but how much He loves us. And God loves us whoever we are, whatever we’ve done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can’t.
Forgiveness and reconciliation are not just ethereal, spiritual, other-worldly activities. They have to do with the real world. They are realpolitik, because in a very real sense, without forgiveness, there is no future.
Just as I need other human beings in order to learn from them, so I also need their trust. If we aren't aware of that, if we fail to take it to heart and instead betray other people's trust, things will go badly with us.
The way sometimes we preach we make out that God is waiting eagerly to catch us out. It's not that way at all. I mean, it is extraordinary because it almost is as if God in fact wills us also to sin, but that is not true.
Consider what we sometimes do with our children: We imbue them with this sense, very early on, that they have got to succeed. We are not content that they just do well, they have got to wipe the floor with the opposition.
Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.
My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument." Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.
In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.
We must return to the fundamentals; the fundamentals being that you count. That is where you start from. That you count; you matter for God. That is a fantastic realization, and one that very few of us actually get to accept.
Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.
I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.
We can encourage more of our universities and municipalities, foundations, corporations, individuals and cultural institutions... to move their money out of the problem (fossil fuels) and into the solutions (renewable energy)
One of the things that people sense is that you are not doing this for self-glorification, you are doing it for the sake of others. The Dalai Lama has been in exile for so many years, yet the Chinese are running scared of him.
Serve others. The failing recipe for happiness and success is to want the good of others." "happiness is when I see others happy. Happiness is a shared thing. I feel very diminished happiness if it is something I enjoy myself.
It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ.
The matter of the abuse and cruelty we inflict on other animals has to fight for our attention in what sometimes seems an already overfull moral agenda. It is vital, however, that these instances of injustice not be overlooked.
People are killed because they're gay. I don't think, "What do I want to do today? I want to speak up on gay rights." No. It's God catching me by my neck. I wish I could keep quiet about the plight of the Palestinians. I can't!
There is no situation that is not transformable. There is no person who is hopeless. There is no set of circumstances that cannot be turned about by ordinary human beings and their natural capacity for love of the deepest sort.