Quotes By Desmond Tutu

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

And every human being is precious.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Without forgiveness, there's no future.

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