To go to prison because of your convictions and be prepared to suffer for what you believe in, is something worthwhile. It is an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences.
Those South Africans who berate me for being loyal to our friends, literally they can go and throw themselves into a pool. I am not going to betray the trust of those who helped us.
True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.
Strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation; your spirit can be full even when your stomach is empty.
The curious beauty about African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad story.
The victory of democracy in South Africa is the common achievement of all humanity.
Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people – men and women, boys and girls – that make the world a special place.
The anchor of all my dreams is the collective wisdom of mankind as a whole.
There must be an end to white monopoly on political power, and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratized.
There was much in such a society that was primitive and insecure and it certainly could never measure up to the demands of the present epoch. But in such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery.
We succeeded to take our last steps to freedom in conditions of relative peace. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace. We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people.
Extremists on all sides thrive, fed by the blood lust of centuries gone by.
I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.
It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.
No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated. Any nation that is progressive is led by people who have had the privilege of studying.
Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.
Do not allow your anger to control your reason, but rather your reason to control your anger.
In the 21st Century, the capacity to communicate will almost certainly be a key human right.
Our children are the rock on which our future will be built, our greatest asset as a nation.
Where people of goodwill get together and transcend their differences for the common good, peaceful and just solutions can be found even for those problems which seem most intractable.