Words matter. These are the best Desmond Tutu Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.
A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.
But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.
We would like to see you departing peacefully.
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.
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
God is patient with us to become the God’s children he wants us to be but you really can see him weeping.
You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.
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.
Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.
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.
Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.
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.
In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.
And every human being is precious.
In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.
Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
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.
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.
For Christians, who believe they are created in the image of God, it is the Godhead, diversity in unity and the three-in-oneness of God, which we and all creation reflect.
God is patient with us to become the God’s children he wants us to be but you really can see him weeping.
Without forgiveness, there’s no future.
Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.
I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.
I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.
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.
Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
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.
As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
Hate has no place in the house of God.
The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.
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.
In God’s family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.
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.
If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?
Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
We would like to see you departing peacefully.
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 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.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.
Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
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.
You must show the world that you abhor fighting.
God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.
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.
