Top 100 Desmond Tutu Quotes
#1. God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
Desmond Tutu
#2. 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.
Desmond Tutu
#3. If we are going to see real development in the world then our best investment is WOMEN!
Desmond Tutu
#4. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?
Desmond Tutu
#5. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.
Desmond Tutu
#6. If you recall the happiest moments in your life, they are all from when you were doing something for somebody else.
Desmond Tutu
#7. The future of our fragile, beautiful planet home is in our hands. As God's family, we are stewards of God's creation. We can be wantonly irresponsible, or we can be caring and compassionate. God says, "I have set before you life and death ... Choose life."
Desmond Tutu
#8. Until women are deeply involved in opposing the violence in the world, we are not going to bring it to an end. All women must be equally at the forefront of the movements for social justice. And
Desmond Tutu
#9. Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.
Desmond Tutu
#10. 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.
Desmond Tutu
#12. 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.
Desmond Tutu
#14. I certainly know that I would not be able to survive if it were not for the fact that I am being upheld by the prayers of so many people.
Desmond Tutu
#15. We need rituals for all traumas and loss, whether it is betrayal or infidelity or violence or murder. Ritual helps us heal, and ritual helped me heal and become ready to consider the person who murdered Angela, his story, his pain.
Desmond Tutu
#16. Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth
Desmond Tutu
#17. When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.
Desmond Tutu
#18. Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.
Desmond Tutu
#19. Thus to forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, that greatest good, communal harmony that enhances the humanity and personhood of all in the community.
Desmond Tutu
#21. I am deeply moved by the warmth and courage of the Canadian people which I felt so strongly during my recent visit to your country. Your support of the struggle against apartheid restored me in my journey home and reassured me that many just people around the world are with us.
Desmond Tutu
#22. Our Lord wanted us to be Christ-like. Christ-like doesn't mean not having faults. It means that you do actually have a capacity to draw out the good that is in others.
Desmond Tutu
#23. We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.
Desmond Tutu
#24. Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.
Desmond Tutu
#25. do not heal in isolation. Connecting with others is how we develop compassion for others and for ourselves.
Desmond Tutu
#26. When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
Desmond Tutu
#27. When we look at a conflict, it is so often rooted in injustice, prejudice, competition for resources, poverty, poor governance and corruption.
Desmond Tutu
#28. Some people are able to use Bible as a means of opposing injustice, whereas others are able to find justification.
Desmond Tutu
#29. Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another, and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.
Desmond Tutu
#31. Fundamental rights belong to the human being just because you are a human being.
Desmond Tutu
#32. Once lost, trust can only be regained if we are as good as our word.
Desmond Tutu
#33. Give young people a greater voice. They are the future and they are much wiser than we give them credit for.
Desmond Tutu
#34. It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. And never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.
Desmond Tutu
#35. Child of God, known by name and whose very hairs are numbered. Praise and adore God and thank him for ever and ever. Amen.
Desmond Tutu
#36. Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.
Desmond Tutu
#37. If we have loved well while we were alive, there is life after death here-our love will go on for generations.
Desmond Tutu
#38. People are able to justify immense cruelty and say that it is something that is sanctioned by their faith.
Desmond Tutu
#39. It may seem daunting, but I am a prisoner of hope. We are more connected than ever before, we have more knowledge, and there are solutions if we work together. Today's technology is a great asset in encouraging global cooperation and understanding.
Desmond Tutu
#40. Don't raise your voice, improve your argument.
[Address at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 November 2004]
Desmond Tutu
#41. We need other human beings in order to be human.
Desmond Tutu
#42. At home in South Africa I have sometimes said in big meetings where you have black and white together: 'Raise your hands!' Then I have said: 'Move your hands,' and I've said 'Look at your hands - different colors representing different people. You are the Rainbow People of God.
Desmond Tutu
#43. There is a certain kind of dignity we admire, and to which we aspire, in the person who refuses to meet anger with anger, violence with violence, or hatred with hatred.
Desmond Tutu
#44. Goodness is stronger than evil.
Love is stronger than hate.
Light is stronger than darkness.
Life is stronger than death.
Victory is ours through Him who loved us.
Desmond Tutu
#45. Somewhere deep inside us we seem to know that we are destined for something better than strife.
Desmond Tutu
#46. My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument." Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.
Desmond Tutu
#47. It is quite exhilarating to speak about a God who has an incredible bias, a notorious bias in favor of the downtrodden. You look at Exodus and the Israelites' escape from a bottomless pit. God is not evenhanded. God is biased up to his eyebrows.
Desmond Tutu
#48. I give great thanks to God that he has created a Dalai Lama. Do you really think, as some have argued, that God will be saying: 'You know, that guy, the Dalai Lama, is not bad. What a pity he's not a Christian'? I don't think that is the case - because, you see, God is not a Christian.
Desmond Tutu
#49. Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.
Desmond Tutu
#50. Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter - you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.
Desmond Tutu
#51. VICTORY IS OURS Goodness is stronger than evil; Love is stronger than hate; Light is stronger than darkness; Life is stronger than death; Victory is ours through Him who loves us. DESMOND TUTU
Desmond Tutu
#52. In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.
Desmond Tutu
#53. I am 52 years of age. I am a bishop in the Anglican Church, and a few people might be constrained to say that I was reasonably responsible. In the land of my birth, I cannot vote.
Desmond Tutu
#54. Catharsis returns us to the purpose for which were originally intended - to be called by God to do good - and thus ultimately returns us to ourselves.
Desmond Tutu
#55. We worshipped in the temple of cutthroat competition, and so some cooked the books, because the treasure is so great.
Desmond Tutu
#56. We would like to see you departing peacefully.
Desmond Tutu
#57. Race should not be used to claim privileges and rights for one group, exclusively, which are denied other different groups. Then that is an illegitimate use of race.
Desmond Tutu
#58. 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.
Desmond Tutu
#59. I'm so thankful a significant majority of Americans are saying no to military intervention. We've got to find a solution that will in the end be one that makes Syria a better country, a better people. We can be human only together.
Desmond Tutu
#60. Every single one of us can do something, however small, to make a difference.
Desmond Tutu
#61. I'm coming to believe more and more in the truth that everything we do has consequences. A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear.
Desmond Tutu
#62. Nuclear abolition is the democratic wish of the world's people, and has been our goal almost since the dawn of the atomic age. Together, we have the power to decide whether the nuclear era ends in a bang or worldwide celebration.
Desmond Tutu
#64. Renewing a relationship is a creative act. We make a new relationship. It is possible to build a new relationship regardless of the realities of the old relationship.
Desmond Tutu
#65. All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.
Desmond Tutu
#66. I can't control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it.
Desmond Tutu
#67. A person who is assured of the love of God will see his fellow men in a different light and treat them and himself differently, and of course this also applies to business leaders.
Desmond Tutu
#68. No one is self-sufficient.
And it's not a one-way thing-
-the generosity of spirit from one side provokes a response in kind from the other side.
Desmond Tutu
#70. And you remember the rainbow in the Bible is the sign of peace. The rainbow is the sign of prosperity. We want peace, prosperity and justice and we can have it when all the people of God, the rainbow people of God, work together.
Desmond Tutu
#71. Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.
Desmond Tutu
#72. The universe can take quite a while to deliver.
Desmond Tutu
#73. I don't know any religion that promotes violence. It is the adherents of whatever religion.
Desmond Tutu
#74. Love your enemy; it will ruin his reputation.
Desmond Tutu
#75. In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.
Desmond Tutu
#76. I certainly don't think we [The Elders organization] are oracles but I would hope that over our lifetimes we have accumulated some useful experience and perhaps even a modicum of wisdom! We don't have all the answers.
Desmond Tutu
#77. Though wrong gratifies in the moment, good yields its gifts over a lifetime.
Desmond Tutu
#78. Never let anyone make you feel inferior for being who you are. When you live the life you were meant to live, in freedom and dignity
Desmond Tutu
#79. As human beings, even if we were to have tried to forget the past, if you dealt with it in a cavalier fashion, it would return to haunt you.
Desmond Tutu
#80. God says, 'You know what? I don't have anybody else ... except you.'
Desmond Tutu
#81. 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.
Desmond Tutu
#82. 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.
Desmond Tutu
#83. It is not too surprising that, having been involved in a policy as evil and dehumanizing as apartheid,
Desmond Tutu
#84. God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.
Desmond Tutu
#85. To treat anyone as if they were less than human, less than a brother or a sister, no matter what they have done, is to contravene the very laws of our humanity.
Desmond Tutu
#86. You might have thought that a world such as ours, so hard-nosed and cynical and brash, would have very little time for transcendence, spiritual values of goodness and compassion, gentleness, and caring, but we actually do experience them.
Desmond Tutu
#87. Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility.
Desmond Tutu
#88. Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.
Desmond Tutu
#89. Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you've closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.
Desmond Tutu
#90. It is for real that injustice and oppression will not have the last word. There was a time when Hitler looked like he was going to vanquish all of Europe, and where is he now?
Desmond Tutu
#91. An abusive relationship should be easy to identify though often one of the most difficult to end.
Desmond Tutu
#92. I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
Desmond Tutu
#93. The devastation wreaked by landmines is not only horrendous but immoral
Desmond Tutu
#94. It is a remarkable feat to be able to see past the inhumanity of the behavior and recognize the humanity of the person committing the atrocious acts. This is not weakness. This is heroic strength, the noblest strength of the human spirit.
Desmond Tutu
#95. A person is a person because s/he recognizes others as persons.
Desmond Tutu
#96. To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good.
Desmond Tutu
#97. The only separation the Bible knows is between believers on the one hand and unbelievers on the other. Any other kind of separation, division, disunity is of the devil. It is evil and from sin.
Desmond Tutu
#98. To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.
Desmond Tutu
#99. We will only truly be free when those in bondage are finally free
Desmond Tutu
#100. Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC's military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.
Desmond Tutu
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
