Nelson Mandela
Sport has the power to inspire and unite people. In Africa, soccer enjoys great popularity and has a particular place in the hearts of people. That is why it is so important that the FIFA World Cup will, for the first time ever, be hosted on the African continent in 2010. We feel privileged and humbled that South Africa has been given this singular honour of being the African host country.Collection: Soccer
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strenthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.Collection: Reality
The majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organization and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy.Collection: Black And White
On the The AIDS Epidemic: This is a war. It has killed more people than has been the case in all previous wars and in all previous natural disasters ... We must not continue to be debating, to be arguing, when people are dying.Collection: War
I feel like a young man of 15.Collection: Men
I admire young people who are concerned with the affairs of their community and nation perhaps because I also became involved in struggle whist I was still at school.Collection: Struggle
I have always endeavoured to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion.Collection: Nimble
We now undertake that we cannot rest while millions of our people suffer the pain and indignity of poverty in all its forms.Collection: Pain
History and the generations to come will judge our leaders by the decisions they make in the coming weeks.Collection: Judging
One effect of sustained conflict is to narrow our vision of what is possible.Collection: Peace
If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings.... What I am condemning is that one power, with a president [George W. Bush] who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.Collection: Country
Both Bush as well, as Tony Blair, are undermining an idea which was sponsored by their predecessors. They do not care. Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations [Ghanaian Kofi Annan] is now a black man? They never did that when secretary-generals were white.Collection: Men
I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one's body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.Collection: Boxing
I am not the only one who did not want revenge. Almost all my colleagues in prison did not want revenge, because there is no time to do anything else except to try and save your people.Collection: Revenge
If we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others.Collection: Achievement
Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.Collection: Beautiful
I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.Collection: Race
A movement without vision would be a movement without moral foundation.Collection: Vision
The New World Order that is in the making must focus on the creation of a world of democracy, peace and prosperity for all.Collection: World Government
No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.Collection: Inspiring
A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.At a point, one can only fight fire with fireCollection: Struggle
My respect for human beings is based not on the colour of a man’s skin nor authority he may wield, but purely on merit.Collection: Respect
It is music and dancing that make me at peace with the world.Collection: Dancing
Music is a great blessing. It has the power to elevate and liberate us. It sets people free to dream. It can unite us to sing with one voice. Such is the value of music.Collection: Dream
The wounds that cannot be seen are more painful than those that can be treated by a doctor.Collection: Doctors
Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry.Collection: Spiritual
Part of building a new nation means building a spirit of tolerance, love and respect amongst the people of this country.Collection: Country
For me, survival is the ability to cope with difficulties, with circumstances, and to overcome them.Collection: Survival
For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.Collection: Principles
A society that does not value its older people denies its roots and endangers its future. Let us strive to enhance their capacity to support themselves for as long as possible and, when they cannot do so anymore, to care for them.Collection: Roots
I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days.Collection: Inspirational
I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.Collection: Taken
There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested.Collection: Optimistic
Honesty,sincer ity,simplicity, humility, pure generosity,abse nce of vanity,readines s to serve others -qualities which are within easy reach of every soul -are the foundation of one's spiritual life.Collection: Spiritual
I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.Collection: Inspiring
Our motto should be: let us make peace so that we can concentrate on the really important work that needs to be done. That is, alleviating the plight of the poor and the defenceless, for as long as most of humanity feels the pain of poverty we all remain prisoners.Collection: Pain
Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the vast majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires that the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded.Collection: Love
I regard it as a duty which I owed, not just to my people, but also to my profession, to the practice of law, and to the justice for all mankind, to cry out against this discrimination which is essentially unjust and opposed to the whole basis of the attitude towards justice which is part of the tradition of legal training in this country. I believed that in taking up a stand against this injustice I was upholding the dignity of what should be an honorable profession.Collection: Country
I can't help it if the ladies take note of me; I am not going to protest.Collection: Helping
Let us remind ourselves that our work is far from complete. Where there is poverty and sickness, including AIDS, where human beings are being oppressed, there is more work to be done. Our work is for freedom for all.Collection: Done
In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people.Collection: Spiritual
The path of those who preach love, and not hatred, is not easy. They often have to wear a crown of thorns.Collection: Love
Let it never be said by future generations that indifference, cynicism or selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of humanism which the Nobel Peace Prize encapsulates. Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr. to have been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.Collection: Kings
I hate racial discrimination most intensely and all its manifestations. I have fought all my life; I fight now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one, whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a Black man in a White man's court. This should not be I should feel perfectly at ease and at home with the assurance that I am being tried by a fellow South African, who does not regard me as an inferior, entitled to a special type of justice.Collection: Hate
The histories of our two peoples, Palestinian and South African, correspond in such painful and poignant ways, that I intensely feel myself being at home amongst compatriotsCollection: Home
Isimangaliso must be the only place on the globe where the oldest land mammal (rhinoceros) and the world biggest terrestrial mammal (elephant) share an ecosystem with the world's oldest fish (coelacanth) and the world's biggest marine mammal (whale)Collection: Marine
I discovered even before I went to jail that apartheid was not run by people who were monolithic in their approach. Some of them didn't even believe in apartheid.Collection: Running