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.
— Desmond Tutu
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.
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.
We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.
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.
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?
When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.
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.
In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.
Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.
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 universe can take quite a while to deliver.
And every human being is precious.
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.
In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.
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.
It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.
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.
Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.
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.
As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
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.
I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.
Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.
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.
Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.
Many people would be surprised that, in fact, I'm quite shy.
In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.
God is patient with us to become the God's children he wants us to be but you really can see him weeping.
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.
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.
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.
Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.
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.
How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?
The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.
You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.
Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
Hate has no place in the house of God.
I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.
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.
It's a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.
I wish I could shut up, but I can't, and I won't.
I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.
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.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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.
God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
