Desmond Tutu Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.

Hate has no place in the house of God.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

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

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.

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 may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

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.

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

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.

God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

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.

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

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 the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.

Do your little bit of good where you are; its those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

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.

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

People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

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.

Niger is not an isolated island of desperation. It lies within a sea of problems across Africa - particularly the 'forgotten emergencies' in poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal.

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.

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

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

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.

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.

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.

God is patient with us to become the God's children he wants us to be but you really can see him weeping.

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.

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.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

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.

The universe can take quite a while to deliver.

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

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.

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

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.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.

Many people would be surprised that, in fact, I'm quite shy.

We would like to see you departing peacefully.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

It's a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.

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.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

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.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute - a white skin.

In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

When a pile of cups is tottering on the edge of the table and you warn that they will crash to the ground, in South Africa you are blamed when that happens.

I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

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

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.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

Full houses at the Assembly Rooms. To keep Michele sweet. That's basically it.

I said yes, and Tutu said, 'He's not very articulate,' which he isn't. He said, 'Is he the most loved man in the world?' I said yes. 'Who is the most loved woman?' Mother Teresa was still alive at the time, so I said her. He replied, 'Yes, and what are these people? These people are good. And why do we love them? Because they warm us. They warm us.'

Goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than darkness. Life is stronger than death. Victory is ours through Him who loved us.

Every praying person, every person who has an encounter with God, must have a passionate concern for his or her brother and sister, his or her neighbor. To treat any of these as if he were less than the child of God is to deny the validity of one's spiritual existence.

True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute.

Every situation of justice is an occasion where someone is being humiliated and they want to restore their dignity.

We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God's family.

If we are going to see real development in the world then our best investment is WOMEN!

There would be those of us who say that in many ways, you worry about what the Jews in Israel are doing to themselves. Yes, they may at the moment have incredible power and are supported almost unconditionally by especially America, but most of the West as well. Yet what they are doing is contrary to the best teaching and highest teachings of their faith.

Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'

Ultimately, suffering is always political with all kinds of justifications - there are those who justify Israel's occupation of land as being a fulfillment of what God had promised.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.

You have to understand that the Bible is really a library of books and it has different categories of material. There are certain parts which you have to say no to. The Bible accepted slavery. St Paul said women should not speak in church at all and there are people who have used that to say women should not be ordained. There are many things that you shouldn't accept.

Africans believe in something that is difficult to render in English. We call it ubuntu, botho. It means the essence of being human. You know when it is there and when it is absent. It speaks about humaneness, gentleness, hospitality, putting yourself out on behalf of others, being vulnerable. It embraces compassion and toughness. It recognizes that my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

You have to say, whatever it is that I say or do or think or teach must be something that will be consistent with who Jesus Christ was. So that is your ultimate litmus test, not that you've got specific words to say, whatever they may be saying. It is what is being said. They're consistent with the revelation of God that we encounter in Jesus.

There's no way in which you can ever win a war against terror. As long as there are conditions in many parts of the world that make people desperate: poverty, disease, ignorance, etc. I hope that we will discover soon, that we can survive, only together. We can prosper only together. And I think people are beginning to realize this, that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think you can have a stable, secure world.

Now that they talk about Islam as being a violent faith, when you look at the history of Christendom, the Crusades and the many wars of religion that were fought, the cruelty of Christians in burning what they believed to be witches and burning heretics, and then very recently they were responsible for the Holocaust... it was Christians.

Bringing people together is what i call 'ubuntu,' which means 'I am because we are.' Far too often people think of themselves as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.

We are all connected. What unites us is our common humanity. I don't want to oversimplify things - but the suffering of a mother who has lost her child is not dependent on her nationality, ethnicity or religion. White, black, rich, poor, Christian, Muslim or Jew - pain is pain - joy is joy.

People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change.

We must act now and wake up to our moral obligations. The poor and vulnerable are members of God's family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change. We, who should have been responsible stewards preserving our vulnerable, fragile planet home, have been wantonly wasteful through our reckless consumerism, devouring irreplaceable natural resources.

We spend billions on banks when we know that a fraction of this money could save all the children in the world.

It isn't that it's questionable when you speak up for the right of people with different sexual orientation. People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation. People are killed because they're gay.

You will find that the Bible, if you want it to, will justify many things. St. Paul had a very male chauvinistic view of women. He would say things like women must not talk in church, must cover their heads, they mustn't talk and must remember that it was a woman who first tempted and this whole mess started because women messed us up. So you can read it in such a way that it justifies polygamy.

Poverty - the greatest cause of human suffering on the planet - is itself exacerbated by conflict, competition for resources, injustice, even the global downturn and climate change. Diseases like AIDS, TB and malaria cannot be tackled without adequate resources. So you see everything is connected. In order to address any major cause of human suffering, we have to work together across many fronts.

People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.

Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action.

Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering--remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you dont want to repeat what happened.

Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.

You can find justification for slavery in the Bible. Some say this is what the Bible says and that closes the argument.