Top 30 Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Quotes

The brutality of apartheid drains you of that emotion of fear if you have gone through everything you can be put through in the process of harassment.

I never talk about my private life.

I identify… with the ideas that Malcolm X stood for.

Politicians are not lovers.

I’m like thousands of women in South Africa who lost their men to cities and prisons… I stand defiant, tall and strong.

The solution of this country’s problems lies in black hands.

I don’t want a grand villa in a rich suburb alongside white people where many of my former comrades choose to live. I would never betray my roots in that way.

Nelson was locked up on Robben Island, and wives like me had been warned we would bring our husbands home as corpses from that place. But I always believed he would be released. It was my duty to have a home ready for us.

We have a shared destiny, a shared responsibility to save the world from those who attempt to destroy it.

It would be a most despicable thing to suggest I would exploit the poor for my own personal gain.

They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become.

We should have sent the apartheid monsters to jail, not let them off with an amnesty.

One of the greatest things I fear is letting down my people. I wouldn’t live with that type of conscience, of having let down my people after they’ve been brutalized for so long.

This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family.

I often wonder why I attract so much criticism.

The life of the President’s First Lady would not have been for me. And I don’t know how I would have been as a housewife.

My continent knows more about me than I do myself.

The ANC has failed to address the problems of the black majority quickly enough.

I was married to the ANC. It was the best marriage I ever had.

You build dreams, you build castles in the air, and you hope that at least part of that will be realized, even under apartheid.

I wanted to be a doctor at some point, and I was always bringing home strays from school: people who were too poor to pay fees or have food. My parents never rebuked me or told me that they were hard-pressed, too.

There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.

The government can become so elitist and concentrate on elitist interests. To help the government, you must constantly hold its attention.

When I was born, my mother was very disappointed. She wanted a son. I knew that from a very early age. So I was a tomboy.

I am not sorry. I will never be sorry. I would do everything I did again if I had to. Everything.

I believe in myself and the justice I’ve fought for all my life.

The years of imprisonment hardened me… Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life… there is no longer anything I can fear.

I was so hooked by the fight for freedom that nothing mattered to us so long as we fulfilled the dream of years and years of our people being liberated. I thought normal life would come the day after.

Those 18 months in solitary confinement… bruised my soul. If I had had a weapon, I would have fought my way out.

I am a living symbol of the white man’s fear. I never realized how deeply embedded this fear is until I came to Brandfort.