Top 100 Quotes About Desmond Tutu
#1. 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
#2. I think there's a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.
Jody Williams
#3. If you need a reference point, she was created in a grandma lab somewhere by crossing the DNA of Mary Poppins, Jack Black, Julia Child and Desmond Tutu.
Scott Dannemiller
#4. As Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!
Richard Rohr
#5. Sometimes strident, often tender, never afraid and seldom without humour, Desmond Tutu's voice will always be the voice of the voiceless.
Nelson Mandela
#6. 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
#7. I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.
Bono
#8. I think it's a good thing for a president or political leaders to want to put their values or their faith into action. Desmond Tutu did that in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. did that here. This is a good thing.
Jim Wallis
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
Desmond Tutu
#12. The black person entered the booth one person and emerged on the other side a new, transfigured person.
Desmond Tutu
#13. I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.
Desmond Tutu
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. We pray that Aung San Suu Kyi and her country are now on a path to freedom
Desmond Tutu
#17. If we are going to see real development in the world then our best investment is WOMEN!
Desmond Tutu
#18. To be neutral in a situation of injustice is to have chosen sides already. It is to support the status quo.
Desmond Tutu
#19. Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
Desmond Tutu
#20. A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
Desmond Tutu
#21. It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.
Desmond Tutu
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.
Desmond Tutu
#26. 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
#27. If you recall the happiest moments in your life, they are all from when you were doing something for somebody else.
Desmond Tutu
#28. I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.
Desmond Tutu
#29. You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.
Desmond Tutu
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice.
Desmond Tutu
#33. 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
#34. Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.
Desmond Tutu
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. It is very difficult now in South Africa to find anyone who ever supported apartheid.
Desmond Tutu
#39. 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
#41. 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
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.
Desmond Tutu
#50. Human beings have a vested interest in being trustworthy.
Desmond Tutu
#51. Healing means that our dignity is restored and we are able to move forward in our lives.
Desmond Tutu
#52. The way to understand any enemy is to realize that, from his perspective, he is not a villain but a hero.
Desmond Tutu
#53. In God's family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.
Desmond Tutu
#54. As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
Desmond Tutu
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. When people decide they want to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.
Desmond Tutu
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth
Desmond Tutu
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.
Desmond Tutu
#71. There is no justice in killing in the name of justice.
Desmond Tutu
#72. People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful.
Desmond Tutu
#73. 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
#74. Arrogance really comes from insecurity, and in the end our feeling that we are bigger than others is really the flip side of our feeling that we are smaller than others.
Desmond Tutu
#75. 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
#76. One of the most blasphemous consequences of injustice, especially racist injustice, is that it can make a child of God doubt that he or she is a child of God.
Desmond Tutu
#77. Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional.
Desmond Tutu
#78. I suppose being the kind of creatures we [people] are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember. If you want to destroy people, destroy their memory, destroy their history.
Desmond Tutu
#79. Men and boys, we show our manhood through the way we treat our women. Our wives, our sisters, our mothers.
Desmond Tutu
#80. God says, "Please, please help me realize this dream." And some of God's best collaborators are the young, because you dream. You dream God's dream.
Desmond Tutu
#82. One of the things we might want to learn when considering the failings of others is not to gloat because someone else has tripped up.
Desmond Tutu
#83. 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
#84. There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.
We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.
Desmond Tutu
#85. In order to truly forgive oneself, one must either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that one's behavior was wrong and accept responsibility or blame for such behavior. Without these elements, self-forgiveness is irrelevant and pseudo self-forgiveness becomes likely.
Desmond Tutu
#86. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All
Desmond Tutu
#87. South Africa, so utterly improbably, is a beacon of hope in a dark and troubled world.
Desmond Tutu
#88. As the victim, you offer the gift of your forgiving to the perpetrator who may or may not appropriate the gift but it has been offered and thereby it liberates the victim.
Desmond Tutu
#89. If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
#90. We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black and white.
Desmond Tutu
#91. 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
#92. 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
Desmond Tutu
#93. We get most upset with those we love because they are close to us and we know that they are aware of our weaknesses ... If only we could learn to live with our inadequacies, our frailties, our vulnerabilities, we would not need to try so hard to push away those who really know us.
Desmond Tutu
#94. True reconciliation is never cheap, for it is based on forgiveness which is costly. Forgiveness in turn depends on repentance, which has to be based on an acknowledgment of what was done wrong, and therefore on disclosure of the truth. You cannot forgive what you do not know.
Desmond Tutu
#95. The truth of who we are is that we are because we belong.
Desmond Tutu
#96. We have an extraordinary God. God is a mighty God, but this God needs you. When someone is hungry, bread doesn't come down from heaven. When God wants to feed the hungry, you and I must feed the hungry. And now God wants peace in the world.
Desmond Tutu
#97. 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
#98. Dream of a world where children can laugh and play and not be blown up by a mine they thought was a toy.
Desmond Tutu
#99. Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.
Desmond Tutu
#100. Laugh more. Don't forget to enjoy the blessings that God bestows on this beautiful planet.
Desmond Tutu
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