Desmond Tutu Quotes

"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."

"Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness."

"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."

"You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them."

"Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world."

"Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning."

"My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together."

"If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."

"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."

"Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice."

"Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?"

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

"Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value."

"Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies."

"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."

"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."

"The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated."

"We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity."

"I wish I could shut up, but I can't, and I won't."

"But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next."

"Without forgiveness, there's no future."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons."

"Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that."

"When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil."

"The universe can take quite a while to deliver."

"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."