Desmond Tutu
Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: God
Universal education is not only a moral imperative but an economic necessity, to pave the way toward making many more nations self-sufficient and self-sustaining.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Sympathy
Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.Collection: Forgiveness
Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Peace
Without forgiveness, there's no future.Collection: Future
God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Courage
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.Collection: Freedom
But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.Collection: God
If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.Collection: Peace
In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.Collection: Family
You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.Collection: God
The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Peace
Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.Collection: Freedom
God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.Collection: Religion
Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Freedom
We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.Collection: God
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.Collection: Forgiveness
When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: History
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.Collection: Religion
Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.Collection: Education
Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?Collection: Amazing
It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Forgiveness
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
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.
You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.
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.
I wish I could shut up, but I can't, and I won't.
We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.
A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?
We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.
I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.
When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.
Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
The universe can take quite a while to deliver.
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.
Hate has no place in the house of God.
Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.
And every human being is precious.
For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.