Top 100 Desmond Quotes
#1. Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.
Desmond Tutu
#2. People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.
Desmond Tutu
#3. God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
Desmond Tutu
#4. Better we see them seeing us, because then we can all see together, but when not seeing them seeing us we might not see them seeing us doing what we are doing. MI5 agent Iona von Ustinov (father of actor Peter Ustinov) to MI6 agent Desmond Bristow about the PDVE (Portuguese Secret Police) in 1944.
Desmond Bristow
#5. Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it.
John Desmond Bernal
#6. it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.
Matthew Desmond
#7. The black person entered the booth one person and emerged on the other side a new, transfigured person.
Desmond Tutu
#8. I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.
Desmond Tutu
#9. 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
#10. The hardest thing was launching 'OK!' magazine; the easiest thing was Channel 5. 'The Express' was my defining moment because our turnover was less than £100m with 150 employees.
Richard Desmond
#11. Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.
John Desmond Bernal
#12. The quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another. Each time we help, and each time we harm, we have a dramatic impact on our world.
Desmond Tutu
#13. I'm crazy. I know I'm crazy 'cause Desmond Tutu told me, and he's very clever. He said, 'You must free yourself, be more of who you are. Be more crazy.' And I'm going to.
Craig Ferguson
#14. We pray that Aung San Suu Kyi and her country are now on a path to freedom
Desmond Tutu
#15. If we are going to see real development in the world then our best investment is WOMEN!
Desmond Tutu
#16. To be neutral in a situation of injustice is to have chosen sides already. It is to support the status quo.
Desmond Tutu
#17. Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
Desmond Tutu
#18. A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
Desmond Tutu
#19. It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.
Desmond Tutu
#20. 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
#21. I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.
Desmond Tutu
#22. You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life.
Desmond Tutu
#24. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.
Desmond Tutu
#25. Many people ask me what I have learned from all of the experiences in my life, and I say unhesitatingly: People are wonderful. It is true. People really are wonderful.
Desmond Tutu
#26. Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.
Paul Desmond
#27. I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.
Desmond Morris
#28. I don't write about the same thing every time, everyday, different things are happening out there and if you take the time to look around, you can see that, then you can put it all together and tell the story.
Desmond Dekker
#29. If you recall the happiest moments in your life, they are all from when you were doing something for somebody else.
Desmond Tutu
#30. I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.
Desmond Tutu
#31. You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.
Desmond Tutu
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice.
Desmond Tutu
#35. Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.
Desmond Tutu
#36. We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.
Matthew Desmond
#37. As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.
Boz Scaggs
#38. Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.
Desmond Tutu
#39. I would like to share with you two simple truths: there is nothing that cannot be forgiven, and there is no one un-deserving of forgiveness.
Desmond Tutu
#41. Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite.
Desmond Tutu
#42. It is very difficult now in South Africa to find anyone who ever supported apartheid.
Desmond Tutu
#43. 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
#44. Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.
Adrian Desmond
#46. 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
#47. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
Matthew Desmond
#49. I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now, so obviously wrong
Desmond Tutu
#51. The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved.
John Desmond Bernal
#52. The central industry of modern civilisation, tending, because of its control over materials, to spread into and ultimately incorporate older industries such as mining, smelting, oil- refining, textiles, rubber, building, and even agriculture in respect to fertilizers and food processing.
John Desmond Bernal
#53. 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
#54. Accept yourself, it will inspire others to do the same for themselves.
Desmond D. Green
#55. It's great isn't it, all this exercise lark? I used to laugh at people on treadmills; now I love it.
Richard Desmond
#56. 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
#57. This is a moral universe, which means that despite all the evidence that seems to be to the contrary, there is no way that evil and injustice and oppression and lies can have the last word ... that is what has upheld the morale of our people, to know that in the end good will prevail.
Desmond Tutu
#59. This is what healing demands. Behavior that is hurtful, shameful, abusive, or demeaning must be brought into the fierce light of truth, and truth can be brutal.
Desmond Tutu
#60. Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.
Desmond Tutu
#61. This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.
Desmond Morris
#62. While I was growing up, I was mostly compliant and easy going. But sometimes I could be a little rascal.
Janell Haworth Desmond
#63. Human beings have a vested interest in being trustworthy.
Desmond Tutu
#64. Healing means that our dignity is restored and we are able to move forward in our lives.
Desmond Tutu
#65. The way to understand any enemy is to realize that, from his perspective, he is not a villain but a hero.
Desmond Tutu
#66. I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.
Paul Desmond
#67. In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.
Desmond Tutu
#68. Although social and personal circumstances will play their part in contributing to how an individual suffers, in Buddhist thought blame is seen as a "poison" that will only lead to negative actions and will do nothing to reduce suffering.
Desmond Biddulph
#69. Our current state of affairs reduces to poverty people born for better things.
Matthew Desmond
#70. As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
Desmond Tutu
#71. We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.
Desmond Tutu
#72. In our own ways, we are all broken. Out of that brokenness, we hurt others. Forgiveness is the journey we take toward healing the broken parts. It is how we become whole again.
Desmond Tutu
#73. Consider what we sometimes do with our children: We imbue them with this sense, very early on, that they have got to succeed. We are not content that they just do well, they have got to wipe the floor with the opposition.
Desmond Tutu
#74. Sometimes I'd hear things on other people's records and I say I wanted it on my records, but Leslie Kong said, no, it wasn't right and that it wasn't my style.
Desmond Dekker
#75. Why should a man deliberately encircle his mind with needless prison walls. No man can reach highest excellence who puts limits to his own thought.
Arthur Desmond
#76. When people decide they want to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.
Desmond Tutu
#77. The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it - oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.
Desmond Tutu
#78. We must return to the fundamentals; the fundamentals being that you count. That is where you start from. That you count; you matter for God. That is a fantastic realization, and one that very few of us actually get to accept.
Desmond Tutu
#79. Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth
Desmond Tutu
#80. We are all connected. What unites us is our common humanity. I don't want to oversimplify things - but the suffering of a mother who has lost her child is not dependent on her nationality, ethnicity or religion. White, black, rich, poor, Christian, Muslim or Jew - pain is pain - joy is joy.
Desmond Tutu
#81. We must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God.
Desmond Tutu
#82. I was born in St. Andrew's and raised in Kingston then I attended the Alpha Boy's school.
Desmond Dekker
#83. There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium.
Desmond Morris
#84. In order to turn around and do something better, we must first escape the vicious circle of self-righteousness and denial. And that calls for the humility to say "I'm sorry. Please forgive me."
Desmond Tutu
#85. All that glitters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons.
John Desmond Bernal
#86. As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.
John Desmond Bernal
#87. What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.
Desmond Tutu
#88. A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.
John Desmond Bernal
#89. 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.
Desmond Tutu
#90. Even the wise appear foolish before one who brings peace to another.
Phoenix Desmond
#91. Reincarnation is, indeed, the key which unlocks all doors, the universal "combination," before which our manacles fall from our limbs
the life-line by which the crooked way is made straight.
Shaw Desmond
#92. For Christians, who believe they are created in the image of God, it is the Godhead, diversity in unity and the three-in-oneness of God, which we and all creation reflect.
Desmond Tutu
#93. The seventeenth, Desmond! Come along at once; everything's all right. We're going to buy a huge bracelet for my wife, an enormous cigarette-holder for Madame Peloux, and a tiny tie-pin for you
Colette
#94. In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is. Not how much we love Him but how much He loves us. And God loves us whoever we are, whatever we've done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can't.
Desmond Tutu
#95. 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
#96. I've been offered a peerage already, and turned it down.
Richard Desmond
#97. Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.
Desmond Tutu
#98. To be holy is to live in a way that reflects the moral perfection of God; it is to live a life marked by love, purity, and righteousness, which are the three most important hallmarks of perfect behavior.
T. Desmond Alexander
#99. There is no justice in killing in the name of justice.
Desmond Tutu
#100. People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful.
Desmond Tutu
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