Quotes By Desmond Tutu

Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

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

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

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.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

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

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

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

Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC's military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.

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.

God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

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.

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.

We would like to see you departing peacefully.

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

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.

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

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

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.

In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

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

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that's where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

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

Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.

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.