Quotes About Apartheid In South Africa

#1. There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

Malcolm X

#2. 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

#3. It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.

Nelson Mandela

#4. There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp.

Chris Abani

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

Nadine Gordimer

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. The history of apartheid-era South Africa is incredibly sad and at times infuriatingly incomprehensible.

Henry Rollins

#12. They don't stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery.

Malcolm X

#13. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

Michelle Alexander

#14. We believe that the world, too, can destroy apartheid, firstly by striking at the economy of South Africa.

Oliver Tambo

#15. A lot of people say colonialism was 'evil' or whatever, but what have they really done with Africa since we gave it back to them? I don't think it should be considered 'racist' to admit maybe ending apartheid did more harm than good in South Africa.

Zach Braff

#16. The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.

Hendrik Verwoerd

#17. As a young woman, I attended Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was then not segregated. But I witnessed the weight of apartheid everywhere around me.

Teresa Heinz

#18. You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

Nadine Gordimer

#19. In my many trips to South Africa, I have met and spoken to a lot of people there, and they all seem to find apartheid as repellent as you would.

Henry Rollins

#20. When I was growing up, it was still during Apartheid, so the country was very shielded from the outside artistic world. Anything that was too subversive was basically banned. All the music that we got from outside of South Africa was the poppiest, least subversive music that you could get.

St. Lucia

#21. I played an integral part in helpings formulating that new vision ... that we must abandon apartheid and accept one united South Africa with equal rights for all, with all forms of discrimination to be scrapped from the statute book.

F. W. De Klerk

#22. 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

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

Desmond Tutu

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Yahya Jammeh

#31. Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Nadine Gordimer

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?

Antjie Krog

#35. When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today.

Ferial Haffajee

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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