Quotes By Desmond Tutu

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

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.

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.

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

Without forgiveness, there's no future.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

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.

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.

If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

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 its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

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

In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.

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

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