Top 526 Quotes & Sayings by Desmond Tutu
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a South African leader Desmond Tutu.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
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.
As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
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.
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.
We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.
Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.
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.
Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
You must show the world that you abhor fighting.
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.
The universe can take quite a while to deliver.
Hate has no place in the house of God.
What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?
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.
God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
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.
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.
Without forgiveness, there's no future.
A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.
If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.
Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.
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.
Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.
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.
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.
The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.
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.
But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.
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.
How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?
It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.
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.
Many people would be surprised that, in fact, I'm quite shy.
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.
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.
God is patient with us to become the God's children he wants us to be but you really can see him weeping.
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.
You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
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.
In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.
People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.
Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?
In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.
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.
And every human being is precious.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I could shut up, but I can't, and I won't.
Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.
We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.
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.
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