Desmond Tutu Quotes

Love your enemy; it will ruin his reputation.

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.

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.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of human beings and our Earth.

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

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

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.

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

We are made for loving. If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water.

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.

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