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Desmond Tutu Quotes - Page 3

All Quotes Abuse Accidents Age Apartheid Caring Challenges Children Choices Christ Church Commitment Community Compassion Competition Conflict Country Death Penalty Dignity Diversity Earth Empathy Energy Environment Evil Failing Family Fighting Forgiveness Freedom Fun Future Gaza Generosity Giving God Goodness Grace Hate Healing Heart Heaven Hell Holocaust Home Humanity Humility Hurt Injustice Insecurity Inspirational Inspiring Jesus Justice Justification Laughter Life Lifetime Lying Memories Mercy Military Nursing Opportunity Pain Past Peace Politics Pope Poverty Prophet Quality Racism Reality Reconciliation Religion Revenge Risk Running Sin Slavery Suffering Unity Universe Violence Vision Waiting War Water Weakness Wife Worship

Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action.

Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action.

Thinking, Compassion, People

"Desmond Tutu on Compassion". Interview with Marc Ian Barasch, www.psychologytoday.com. March 1, 2005.

The fundamental law of human beings is interdependence. A person is a person through other persons.

Change, Law, Collaboration

As much as the world has an instinct for evil and is a breeding ground for genocide, holocaust, slavery, racism, war, oppression, and injustice, the world has an even greateer instinct for goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love.

Dance, War, Evil

You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.

Inspirational, Family, God

Address at his enthronement as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, September 7, 1986.

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

Knowing, Ubuntu, Self

Desmond Tutu (2012). “No Future Without Forgiveness”, p.35, Random House

My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity especially on the situation in Gaza shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma

Military, Silence, Community

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

Racist, Territory, Apartheid

Too frequently we think we have to do spectacular things. Yet if we remember that the sea is actually made up of drops of water and each drop counts, each one of us can do our little bit where we are. Those little bits can come together and almost overwhelm the world. Each one of us can be an oasis of peace.

Thinking, Oasis, Sea

We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water.

Fighting, Oil, People

Children learn about the nature of the world from their family. They learn about power and about justice, about peace and about compassion within the family. Whether we oppress or liberate our children in our relationships with them will determine whether they grow up to oppress and be oppressed or to liberate and be liberated.

Children, Growing Up, Compassion

Desmond Tutu (2011). “God Has A Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Times”, p.86, Random House

Poverty - the greatest cause of human suffering on the planet - is itself exacerbated by conflict, competition for resources, injustice, even the global downturn and climate change. Diseases like AIDS, TB and malaria cannot be tackled without adequate resources. So you see everything is connected. In order to address any major cause of human suffering, we have to work together across many fronts.

Order, Competition, Suffering

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.

Suicide, Military, Land

"Apartheid in the Holy Land". www.theguardian.com. April 29, 2002.

If we have loved well while we were alive, there is life after death here-our love will go on for generations.

Love, Generations, Goes On

Without forgiveness there can be no future for a relationship between individuals or within and between nations.

Individual, Nations

""Truth and reconciliation"". BBC Focus on Africa magazine, January-March 2000.

The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

People, Weakness, Western Culture

Source: www.egonzehnder.com

We must act now and wake up to our moral obligations. The poor and vulnerable are members of God's family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change. We, who should have been responsible stewards preserving our vulnerable, fragile planet home, have been wantonly wasteful through our reckless consumerism, devouring irreplaceable natural resources.

Home, Should Have, Cities

When you go to the Holy Land and see what's being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it's the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa. Whether you want to say Israel practices apartheid is immaterial. They are doing things, given their history, you think, "Do you remember what happened to you?" Then they clobber you and say, "You are anti-Semitic."

Thinking, Land, Practice

"Interview: Desmond Tutu on gay rights, the Middle East and Pope Francis". Interview With Sarah Pulliam Bailey, www.washingtonpost.com. September 13, 2013.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

Inspirational, Peace, Ordinary Extraordinary

"Made for Goodness" by Desmond Tutu, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 12, 2012.

If we succeed in empowering girls, we'll succeed in everything else.

Girl, Empowering, Succeed

It isn't that it's questionable when you speak up for the right of people with different sexual orientation. People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation. People are killed because they're gay.

Gay, Ethnicity, People

"Interview: Desmond Tutu on gay rights, the Middle East and Pope Francis". Interview With Sarah Pulliam Bailey, www.washingtonpost.com. September 13, 2013.

God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

Love Is, Sides, Conflict

"Archbishop Desmond Tutu". Interview with Frank Lipman, www.bewell.com. April 14, 2009.

I'm absolutely, utterly, and completely certain that God wouldn't be homophobic. I'd much rather go to hell - I really would much rather go to hell - than go to a homophobic heaven.

Leadership, Wisdom, Class

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

Diversity, Celebrating Diversity, Universe

Desmond Tutu, John Allen (2011). “God Is Not A Christian”, p.49, Random House

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Bullying, Justice, Sides

"The secrets of a peacemaker". Interview with Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. May 22, 2009.

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'

Ubuntu, Oneness, Humanity

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