The problem is not a lack of understanding of what we are saying and doing; the problem is difference of opinion about what to do.

Gloom and despondency have never defeated adversity. Trying times need courage and resilience. Our strength as a people is not tested during the best of times.

Our experience over the last 20 years has shown that indeed people must themselves become their own liberators. You cannot wait for somebody else to come and rescue you.

We should never become despondent because the weather is bad, nor should we turn triumphalist because the sun shines.

As Africans, we need to share common recognition that all of us stand to lose if we fail to transform our continent.

When will the day come that our dignity will be fully restored, when the purpose of our lives will no longer be merely to survive until the sun rises tomorrow!

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.

Does HIV cause AIDS? Can a virus cause a syndrome? How? It can't, because a syndrome is a group of diseases resulting from acquired immune deficiency.

A global human society, characterised by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable

None dare challenge me when i say i am an Afrikan.

We do not accept that human society should be constructed on the basis of a savage principle of the survival of the fittest

Sometimes what we imagine and the world aren't different things. Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

Misfortune does not help us to believe.

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

I would suggest to you that at this moment you are the only self that you have ever had; you've never had a childhood; there wasn't a five-minute-ago time.

A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.

Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence

I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago.

If we can not smile, we cannot help other people to smile.

It is not the part of prudence to neglect that which antiquity in its long experience has approved and which is also taught by apostolic authority.