Desmond Tutu Quotes

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

You must show the world that you abhor fighting.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.

True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

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.

Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

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.

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

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

In God’s family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.

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.

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.