Quotes About Apartheid

#1. The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.

Saul Williams

#2. My own electorate, which I represented for 36 years as an anti-apartheid politician, had a considerable number of Jewish voters supporting me throughout my career.

Helen Suzman

#3. There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.

Samantha Power

#4. For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.

Arundhati Roy

#5. America's view of apartheid is simple and straightforward: We believe it is wrong. We condemn it. And we are united in hoping for the day when apartheid will be no more.

Ronald Reagan

#6. The kids growing up in the apartheid era were so restricted and angry - if they spoke out against it, they were thrown in jail.

Malik Bendjelloul

#7. Whether 'Avatar' is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick 'District 9', released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race.

Annalee Newitz

#8. I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.

Desmond Tutu

#9. It is very difficult now in South Africa to find anyone who ever supported apartheid.

Desmond Tutu

#10. HEAVEN: The big apartheid in the sky.

Philip Appleman

#11. My time in prison only deepened my resolve against apartheid. Even while I was in prison, I fought against it, teaching my cellmates about white supremacy and how to fight against it.

Nelson Mandela

#12. Imagine if your kids had to carry a ladder to climb an apartheid wall to get to school everyday.

Omar Suleiman

#13. 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

#14. It is bad religion to deify doctrines and creeds ... Doctrines, let's not forget, supported slavery and apartheid ... Moreover, doctrines can divide while compassion can only unite.

William Sloane Coffin

#15. There should be a class on sex
education, a real sex-education class.
There should be a class on police brutality. There should be a class on apartheid. There should be a class
on why people are hungry. But there are not. There are classes on gym. Physical education. Let's learn volleyball.

Tupac Shakur

#16. Very sad to hear about the passing of Nelson Mandela. He was a true inspiration for human rights and equality for South Africa and the reason apartheid no longer exists there. The world will never forget his capacity for forgiveness and magnanimity. RIP

Bryan Adams

#17. Don't let anyone tell you that Apartheid has nothing to do with South Africa now. Those roots run deep and tangled and we'll be tripping over them for many generations to come.

Lauren Beukes

#18. The people who are opposing the policy of apartheid have not the courage of their convictions. They do not marry non-Europeans.

P. W. Botha

#19. How many murders are committed in Gauteng, or in the Western Cape, in a month? A week? A day? An hour? But of course we are not allowed to know for sure. In close and direct imitation of his apartheid models, Selebi ensures that no statistics about crime may be published regularly in the press.

Thabo Mbeki

#20. We cannot blame other people for our troubles. We are not victims of the influx of foreign people into South Africa. We must remember that it was mainly due to the aggressive and hostile policies of the apartheid regime that the economic development of our neighbours was undermined.

Nelson Mandela

#21. It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ... That's the world! On which hope sits!

Barack Obama

#22. Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

Jonathan Kozol

#23. 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

#24. In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

Noam Chomsky

#25. We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.

Vandana Shiva

#26. Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.

Miriam Makeba

#27. 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

#28. We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let's take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.

Muhammad Yunus

#29. BDS is perhaps the most ambitious, empowering, and promising Palestinian-led global movement for justice and rights. BDS has the capacity to challenge Israel's colonial rule and apartheid in a morally consistent, effective, and, crucially, intelligent manner.

Omar Barghouti

#30. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

Nelson Mandela

#31. Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.

Ruth First

#32. We used to say to the apartheid government: you may have the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come: join the winning side. His Holiness and the Tibetan people are on the winning side.

Desmond Tutu

#33. I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

Athol Fugard

#34. It may be that apartheid brings such stupendous economic advantages to countries that they would sooner have apartheid than permit its destruction.

Oliver Tambo

#35. Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

Nadine Gordimer

#36. 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

#37. The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires!

Wilbur Smith

#38. No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It's not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side.

Silvan Shalom

#39. When I was a school kid in Coventry, I used to put up anti-apartheid stickers.

Jerry Dammers

#40. Apartheid was in South Africa; now it has been transferred to Palestine.

Yahya Jammeh

#41. I liberate minds with my music. That's more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Kanye West

#42. I discovered even before I went to jail that apartheid was not run by people who were monolithic in their approach. Some of them didn't even believe in apartheid.

Nelson Mandela

#43. Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

Damon Galgut

#44. Obama's not down for the civil rights struggle, and he certainly wasn't down for the apartheid struggle, but he's clearly gonna take advantage of it and insert himself in such a way as to make it look like he is single-handedly responsible for apartheid going by the wayside.

Rush Limbaugh

#45. One can't erase the tremendous burden of apartheid in 10 years, 20 years, I believe, even 30 years.

Susan Rice

#46. Israel is much worse than the original apartheid state.

Clare Short

#47. Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them - and that is what apartheid stole from us: time.

Trevor Noah

#48. Apartheid isn't that cut-and-dry. All men are not created equal.

Ted Nugent

#49. While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

Damon Galgut

#50. I lost contact with my father for many years because of apartheid. For, like, six years, I didn't see my dad. And, now, this was the six years of being a teenager.

Trevor Noah

#51. It is often forgotten today that Plessy v. Ferguson was not an isolated Supreme Court decision. In case after case, the Court reaffirmed and upheld the ability of states to enforce apartheid.

Erwin Chemerinsky

#52. The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.

Hans Blix

#53. 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.

Desmond Tutu

#54. The private schools and the independent schools like Oprah's are really doing well because they've got the best of everything but it certainly puts the spotlight on a system of public education that is still reeling from the apartheid years [in South Africa].

Charlayne Hunter-Gault

#55. My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy ... and I believed that I didn't really have a function as a useful artist in that anymore.

Athol Fugard

#56. I am sick and tired of the hollow parrot-cry of "Apartheid!" I've said many times that the word "Apartheid" means good neighbourliness.

P. W. Botha

#57. Violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid.

Nelson Mandela

#58. My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.

Rachel Holmes

#59. I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#60. South Africans have no concept of time and this is also why we can't solve poverty and social problems ... It's now 10 years since the fall of the Apartheid government and we cannot blame Apartheid for being tardy.

Nelson Mandela

#61. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.

Trevor Noah

#62. The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#63. I told my cellmates about the oppression of the whites and apartheid. I helped organize hunger strikes and the like in my prison.

Nelson Mandela

#64. I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love.

Kamila Shamsie

#65. Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa.

Edward Said

#66. I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort.

Cornel West

#67. When was in prison I admired him for his moral strength ...
Of his period in power I can see few results. Apartheid no longer exists, at least to all appearances, but no one understands what the new government in South Africa is doing.

Mengistu Haile Mariam

#68. Being a journalist, being exposed to the world, to social injustice, to intolerance, growing up here, under apartheid, benefitting from that, has all shaped who I am and what my passions are, and of course that's going to come through in my writing.

Lauren Beukes

#69. I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag.

Al Sharpton

#70. I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman ... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.

Trevor Noah

#71. We're building what I call 'software apartheid.' We're in the process of creating a divided society: those who can use technology on one side, and those who can't on the other. And it happens to divide neatly along economic lines.

Alan Cooper

#72. I didn't actually realise what apartheid meant. I'm probably a bit naive, but I thought it was more of a vague segregation, like on the beaches and buses.

John Deacon

#73. In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don't want them.

Noam Chomsky

#74. We struggled against apartheid because we were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about. It is the same with homosexuality. The orientation is a given, not a matter of choice. It would be crazy for someone to choose to be gay, given the homophobia that is present.

Desmond Tutu

#75. I want my commitment to ending girl marriage to be equal to my commitment to ending apartheid.

Desmond Tutu

#76. In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

Barack Obama

#77. Women have always struggled with their men-folk for the abolition of slavery, the liberation of countries from colonialism, the dismantling of apartheid and the attainment of peace. It is now the turn of men to join women in their struggle for equality.

Gertrude Mongella

#78. If you sit down and talk to a person, it's easy to convince him that apartheid can never save a country and will lead to the slaughtering of innocent people - including his own people.

Nelson Mandela

#79. The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what is was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.

Trevor Noah

#80. I was 15 years old when I first heard the name Mandela, or Madiba, as he is fondly known in Africa. In apartheid South Africa he was public enemy number one. Shrouded in secrecy, myth and rumour, the media called him 'The Black Pimpernel'.

Kumi Naidoo

#81. Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves - the areas set aside in law for African occupation - as early as 1959 and 1960.

Ruth First

#82. I've been offered jobs by companies that supported apartheid many times in the 25 years of my modeling career, but I have never taken one of them. I have to refuse that money, because I'm not going to work against my people. They've suffered enough.

Naomi Campbell

#83. With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.

Jack Kemp

#84. Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

Alice Walker

#85. I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.

Tom Morello

#86. To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of huger and deprivation is to dehumanize them. But such has been the terrible fate of all black persons in our country under the system of apartheid.

Nelson Mandela

#87. For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.

Athol Fugard

#88. We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.

Desmond Tutu

#89. The so-called 'Palestinian autonomous areas' are bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system.

Nelson Mandela

#90. Apartheid cannot be reformed, it has to be eliminated.

Olof Palme

#91. There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Barbara Amiel

#92. Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.

Cornel West

#93. It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.

Harry Oppenheimer

#94. Arthur Ashe had been the first black athlete to play Johannesburg at the time of apartheid.

Yannick Noah

#95. I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#96. The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

Daniel Hannan

#97. 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.

Desmond Tutu

#98. If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, 'It's just a cultural thing'? I don't think so. I would hope not.

Martha McSally

#99. I hadn't fought enough for the injustice of the Apartheid.

Arnon Milchan

#100. Our involvement in the civil rights movement is what sent us into our involvement against apartheid.

Mary Jane Patterson