Quotes By Desmond Tutu

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.

Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

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.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

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.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it - oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

Without forgiveness, there's no future.

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

We would like to see you departing peacefully.

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

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.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

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.

You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.

Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you've closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute - a white skin.

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.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

The universe can take quite a while to deliver.

People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.