Quotes By Desmond Tutu

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hate has no place in the house of God.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.