Desmond Tutu Quotes

Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, his will for us will prevail, love will prevail over hate, justice over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness.

There is room for everyone; there is room for every culture, race, language and point of view.

Making the truth public is a form of justice. This is a moral universe and you've got to take account of the fact that truth and lies and goodness and evil are things that matter.

Once you have women liberated, it's amazing how many other problems get resolved--pover ty, education, health. Women are the key in any community.

Many people ask me what I have learned from all of the experiences in my life, and I say unhesitatingly: People are wonderful. It is true. People really are wonderful.

I am because other people are.

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.'

We worshipped in the temple of cutthroat competition, and so some cooked the books, because the treasure is so great.

Dream! Dream! And then go for it!

There are things that must evoke our anger to show we care. It is what we do with that anger. If we direct that energy we can use it positively or destructively.

Nursing a grudge is bad for your heath.

To be impartial... is indeed to have taken sides already... with the status quo.

It may be a procession of faithful failures that enriches the soil of godly success.

If everyone who wants to see an end to poverty, hunger and suffering speaks out, then the noise will be deafening.

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.

The reprisal against the suicide bomber does not bring peace. There is a suicide bomber, a reprisal and then a counter-reprisal. And it just goes on and on.

Each one of us can be an oasis of peace.

To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good.

I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.

You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.

One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don't have a history that they have no roots.

We need to be accountable to God's family. Once we start living in a way that is people-friendly to all of God's family, we will also be environment-friendly.

It is very difficult now in South Africa to find anyone who ever supported apartheid.

The world needs a revolution led by women.

Let girls be girls and not brides

Freedom and liberty lose out by default because good people are not vigilant.

The destruction of the earth’s environment is the human rights challenge of our time.

God has such a deep reverence for our freedom that he'd rather let us freely go to Hell than be compelled to go to Heaven.

Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.

I believe history teaches us a categorical lesson: that once a people are determined to become free, then nothing in the world can stop them reaching their goal.

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.

Beware when you take on the Church of God. Others have tried and have bitten the dust.

To forgive is not just to be altruistic.

The universe can take quite a while to deliver.

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.

God is not a diversion.

God says, "Please, please help me realize this dream." And some of God's best collaborators are the young, because you dream. You dream God's dream.

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

Serve others. The failing recipe for happiness and success is to want the good of others.

We are made for loving.

The worst thing that can happen to anybody in this cultural environment is to fail.

[Pope Francis ] is taken a selfie!He's a tremendous breath of fresh air.

When a fire starts in one it just races through. And that is in a way unconscionable.

If forgiving depended on the culprit owning up, then the victim would always be at the mercy of the perpetrator. The victim would be bound in the shackles of victimhood.

We give kudos to people who have succeeded. We don't care in what they succeeded as long as they succeeded. The worst thing that can happen to anybody in this cultural environment is to fail.

Being formed into a nation takes some doing.

When we hear a story of the abuse of a child or the abuse of women almost all people are appalled by instances of that kind.

Our Christian faith is actually very subversive of the conventional notion of success - the notion that what invests a person with worth is something extrinsic.

Human beings are fundamentally good.

Forgiveness is not generally something that you find as a coin to be used by politicians.