Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by Desmond Tutu


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

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

Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument.
– Desmond Tutu
A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
– Desmond Tutu
Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, Now is that political or social? He said, I feed you. Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.
– Desmond Tutu
Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.
– Desmond Tutu
Without forgiveness, there's no future.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– 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.
– Desmond Tutu
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.
– Desmond Tutu
Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?
– Desmond Tutu
Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.
– Desmond Tutu
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
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.
– Desmond Tutu
In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.
– Desmond Tutu
In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.
– Desmond Tutu
In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.
– Desmond Tutu
If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.
– Desmond Tutu
Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
– Desmond Tutu
But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu
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.
– Desmond Tutu