Top 100 Quotes About Nelson
#1. I grew up with the Highwaymen, which was Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. Mom and Dad rode rodeo, so country music was always in the house and the car. They threw in some Dolly Parton, too.
Christian Kane
#2. We'll have to see if CSI picked up anything from the scene,' says Nelson. 'Are they finished?' 'Yes,' says Tanya. 'Shall I liaise with them?' Tanya loves liaising, it sounds so much more important than keeping in touch. 'If
Elly Griffiths
#3. My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I'm trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.
Nina Simone
#4. Michael Phelps and Willie Nelson are teaming up to do an album ... They're covering The Doobie Brothers.
Reba McEntire
#5. Around the world, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela
what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term. It takes more than a single president. It takes more than a single individual.
Barack Obama
#6. I'm specifically talking about Bill Nelson which merely said to [Barak] Obama stop what you're doing because it's against the law. He's out there saying that today we're gonna start separating families from their children and start sending people home, and it's not happening.
Rush Limbaugh
#7. I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson.
William Monahan
#8. Whoever becomes the head of the National Theater finds himself in a position like that of Nelson's Column - pigeons dump on you because you're there.
Peter Hall
#9. It's like Willie Nelson. You're an artist and you have different styles inside of you.
Suzy Bogguss
#10. It was a hallmark of Nelson Mandela's leadership that being open to change made him appear not weaker, but even stronger.
Klaus Schwab
#11. To judge by the event is an error all commit: for in every instance courage, if crowned with success, is heroism; if clouded by defeat, temerity. When Nelson fought his battle in the Sound, it was the result alone that decided whether he was to kiss a hand at court or a rod at a court-martial.
Charles Caleb Colton
#12. The world thanks you for sharing Nelson Mandela with us.
Barack Obama
#13. I used to do my Nelson Mandela voice to blag restaurant tables in Cape Town. It rarely worked. Now what a great city that is.
Rory Bremner
#14. Nelson Mandela was in jail when I was really young, and Winnie Mandela was one of the biggest faces of the movement. In South Africa we have a common phrase - it's like a chant in the street and at rallies: "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo." Which means, "You strike a woman, you strike a rock."
Trevor Noah
#15. In the winter I was with Nelson Piquet. He was talking about his capacity to race faster. He said that he was still learning new things all the time.
Jean Alesi
#16. Like you do about Nelson Mandela, you can't help feeling the guy's a good man.
Ralph Steadman
#17. Most people think that George Nelson, Charles Eames and Eliot Noyes invented industrial design. That is, of course, an exaggeration. George did it without any assistance from the other two.
Bill N. Lacy
#18. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess.
Nelson Mandela
#19. Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson].
Edward Norton
#20. I met Nelson Mandela, and I really didn't know what to say. It was years ago at a benefit. I was just in awe of this man because of what he'd done.
Robin Williams
#21. I was terrified, terrified in 'Songwriter,' because there I was, New York Jewish girl, singing country-western onstage with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. I mean, forget it. I was so terrified.
Lesley Ann Warren
#22. Nelson Mandela is my hero outside of football. I was fortunate enough to meet him a couple of times. He was really clued up on his football and he knew me, so that was just unbelievable. It really stuck with me.
Ryan Giggs
#23. Whether it is Obamacare, the stimulus, Wall Street bailouts, the food safety bill - on vote after vote, Bill Nelson has chosen to side with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama over the people of Florida.
Adam Hasner
#24. Nelson Mandela was just a human being, a person like other people, and everyone relaxed. Within a minute, that sort of thing about the leader and the lead, the gap was closed, and that's a rare thing.
Kumi Naidoo
#25. Bobby Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller are having a row, ostensibly over the plight of New York's mentally retarded, a loose definition of which would include everyone in New York who voted for Bobby Kennedy or Nelson Rockefeller.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#26. I am not sure about Bill Nelson. I haven't heard him say, 'Let's junk the NASA plan to send humans to the moon.' He's not about to say that. That would not be very popular.
Buzz Aldrin
#27. I like people who are minimalist with their words. Jack Nicholson thinks a lot then says something, and it's always spot on. Nelson Mandela is the same.
David A. Stewart
#28. Given lesser opportunities, Kissinger would have done very well as a talk show host. Fortunately for him, although not so fortunately for the United States, he found his patron in Nelson Rockefeller instead of William Paley.
Lewis H. Lapham
#29. Mind you, you don't get albums written about really good people like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, do you? Good people's places in Heaven may be assured, but nobody's going to have a chart-topping album full of songs about someone's good deeds.
Mitch Winehouse
#30. Nelson Mandela was a towering figure in our time; a legend in life and now in death - a true global hero
David Cameron
#31. The Tea Party
I had a little tea party
This afternoon at three.
'Twas very small-
Three guest in all-
Just I, myself and me.
Myself ate all the sandwiches,
While I drank up the tea;
'Twas also I who ate the pie
And passed the cake to me. Jessica Nelson North
Jessica Nelson North
#32. Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.
Toni Morrison
#34. Nelson Mandela will always be the face of South Africa. The traveler passing through the country will see Mandela's face almost everywhere he looks. Truly, the man is omnipresent.
Henry Rollins
#35. Nelson Mandela said: 'It always seems impossible until it's done.' Peace is possible.
John Bonifaz
#36. Those 10000 days in prison, but this never made Nelson Mandela to leave what he was doing. He loved what he did and he would repeat to again if he had been arrested again and imprisoned again! He has his bigger picture in view!
Israelmore Ayivor
#37. Farm Aid was started in 1985 by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews as a concert to support small local farms in the U.S.
Rebecca Pidgeon
#38. My greatest hero is Nelson Mandela. What a man. Incarcerated for 25 years, he was released in 1990 and he hasn't reoffended. I think he's going straight, which shows you prison does work.
Ricky Gervais
#39. And Barry Levinson is insanely funny. I don't know if you know this, not everyone does, but he and Craig T. Nelson were a comedy team back in the coffeehouse days of the late '60s.
Kevin Pollak
#40. When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
Johnny Depp
#41. Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.
Ben Lerner
#42. Ever since Willie Nelson brought rednecks into an alliance with hippies back in the psychedelic '70s, Austin has milked its quirky libertarian spirit for a worldwide bonanza of free publicity.
Douglas Brinkley
#43. The political, social, and spiritual impact of the life example set by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela might be measured in part by the profound and unique gestures made by people in different countries to honor his life upon learning of his death.
Aberjhani
#44. When Nelson Mandela walked free, the world sang with joy. Ever since, South Africa has stood as a beacon of hope for Africa.
Ban Ki-moon
#46. I waited, and I'm sure Elvis did too, for each Ricky Nelson record like we would a Chuck Berry record or a Fats Domino record, to see what was going on. I used to say to some of the guys that Ricky Nelson learned to sing on million selling records.
Roy Orbison
#47. Nelson Mandela is a leader Barack Obama should try to emulate ...
He could start by spending 27 years in prison.
Don Imus
#48. Mr. nelson sighed and stalked across the room to me. He thrust the velvet box into my hands. I cracked the box, and the sound echoed through the room. A glittering diamond stared back at me. But it wasn't just any diamond. It was two carats of commitment in a platinum setting.
Katie Ashley
#49. I've dreamed of being on the road, traveling and touring, for as long as I've been into doing music. It's what I live for. I just wanna be Willie Nelson.
G-Eazy
#50. I've tended to lean more toward the Dalai Lama and people like Russell Means who have been my political and spiritual North Stars, but I certainly regard Nelson Mandela with great respect and humility.
Ian Astbury
#51. I am what I am.........both as a result of people who respected me and helped me, and of those who did not respect me and treated me badly.
Nelson Mandela
Anthony Sampson
#52. My dad taught me to play the guitar. We grew up with country music. We had every Willie Nelson record (laughs). I was saved at a young age and had a great desire to follow God. I was really focused on that through my whole life, even as a kid and through high school.
Chris Tomlin
#53. Being black and speaking properly are not mutually exclusive. My father was an African, and he spoke beautifully at home. Nelson Mandela speaks beautifully. Should Mandela put his hat on backwards and say, 'Yo, homey, this is Nelson. Yo, Winnie, yo, this is def'?
Franklyn Ajaye
#54. No one in the church, in 1970, knew that the doctrine of pre-tribulation rapture had never been found in history before 1830, or that it was first promoted by an Irish minister named John Nelson Darby.
Ken Dahl Gabby Schulz
#55. President Obama compared himself to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the struggle to bring about change. The comparison is flawed. They spent years in jail before taking political power, while politicians from Chicago do it the other way around.
Argus Hamilton
#56. Our father taught us how to play. He's also our biggest inspiration and he opened our ears to a lot of older music, like Richie Valens, Chuck Berry, Willie Nelson, and Fats Domino.
Henry Garza
#57. 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
#58. Leaving golf aside for the moment, I'd choose Roger Federer as a sporting role model, Muhammad Ali for a sporting and non-sporting role model and Nelson Mandela as a true and lasting inspiration.
Rory McIlroy
#59. Somebody bought me a Snuggie as a joke gift. Haha, the joke's on you, I enjoy it. I toss and turn at night, finally a blanket that's like, 'I'm going to keep you warm.' It's like having a small child with polio keep you in a full nelson - the perfect pressure.
Daniel Tosh
#60. We're trained to see the world in terms of charismatic organizations and charismatic people. That's who we look to for leadership and change, for transformation. We're awaiting the next J.F.K., the next Martin Luther King, the next Gandhi, the next Nelson Mandela.
Paul Hawken
#61. Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.
Coretta Scott King
#62. Nelson Mandela said it this way, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.
Christopher Marco
#63. Of course, Nelson Mandela, everybody knows Nelson Mandela. I mean, he's a great gift not only for Africa but for the whole world, actually. But do not expect everybody to be a Nelson Mandela.
Mo Ibrahim
#64. You wanted to talk to me about SHCH.' Sacred Heart Children's Home, Nelson works out silently. He hates acronyms. Whitcliffe, of course, loves them.
Elly Griffiths
#65. In Durban, where I was born and grew up, and all over Africa, Nelson Mandela was a hero! Now he is a hero to the world.
Kumi Naidoo
#66. The day I die, I'll be too busy thinking to notice he waved his hand as he left the ship.
- Nelson Moon, shipwright and designer of the Altered Moon. Current location: Cantankerous Base, Planet Tarris, Arzian Alliance
A.Z. Kelvin
#67. Nelson Mandela is awe inspiring - a person who really sacrificed for what he believed in. I feel truly humbled by him.
Annie Lennox
#68. Golf took young kids like Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan and myself out of the caddie ranks and gave us money and a little bit of fame and let us live in the tall cotton.
Jimmy Demaret
#69. When you are young and strong ... you can stay alive on your hatred" ... but realized later "They can take everything from me except my mind and heart"
Nelson Mandela from Long Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela
#70. We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.
Richard Corliss
#71. It was spine tingling, actually, when you saw how people kept saying, "Release Nelson Mandela," and meaning really, "Release all of our political prisoners."
Desmond Tutu
#72. One of the things that I noticed with my own eyes was Nelson Mandela ability to engage with kings and queens and heads of state on the one hand, and his ability to engage with ordinary people, equally comfortably.
Kumi Naidoo
#73. If Detroit was a watershed concert for me, traveling with Willie Nelson through Texas and Louisiana was a milestone of a different sort.
Charley Pride
#74. Nelson Mandela once said "I can't help it if the ladies take note of me; I'm not going to protest."
Kumi Naidoo
#75. Unsurprisingly, Nelson Mandela had and still has many detractors.
Henry Rollins
#76. In 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks - everybody, it seems - now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country.
Douglas Brinkley
#77. The charismatic portrait of the modern leadership looks nothing like Fidel Castro. It is a faceless portrait that epitomizes the toughness of Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela's charisma, and the most compassionate heart of Mother Theresa.
Anthony Obi Ogbo
#78. What an honor it was to step into the shoes of Nelson Mandela and portray a man who defied odds, broke down barriers, and championed human rights before the eyes of the world.
Idris Elba
#79. I didn't survive, I prepared." Nelson Mandela's answer when Tony asked him, "Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?
Timothy Ferriss
#80. Willie Nelson, out there 200 days a year, calls his band family. And it is.
Brad Paisley
#81. But it was great, we sit in the same dressing room where, like, Johnny Cash sat and Willie Nelson and all those guys. That was in itself something amazing - I was on the same space these guys stood on, ya know?
Alan Vega
#82. When the image of Nelson Mandela may be more familiar to us than the face of our next-door neighbour, something has changed in the nature of our everyday experience.
Anthony Giddens
#83. What the hell are you doing?" Nelson asked.
Blake Pierce
#84. Much of the fire with him [Ben Hogan] was lit by Byron Nelson, who came from the same town - the same caddie yard - and achieved fame and fortune several years ahead of Ben and who, as a kid, had always been popular and better liked than Ben. No puzzle at all.
Dan Jenkins
#85. As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.
Jackson Browne
#86. Today, I see thousands of Mahatma Gandhis, Martin Luther Kings, and Nelson Mandelas marching forward and calling on us. The boys and girls have joined. I have joined in. We ask you to join, too.
Kailash Satyarthi
#87. Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela - who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing.
Rush Limbaugh
#88. I been starin' at the back a Jimmy Nelson's head for four grades now and I been noticin' how his blond hair curls against the skin on his neck and the birthmark shaped like a half-moon I wanna press my fingernail into.
Brooke Warra
#89. I wanted to play drums, and I got a set when I was 14 and just started to play in the house, to the stereo. I liked Ringo Starr, of course. And Sandy Nelson. I had his record, 'Let There Be Drums,' and I'd play along with it.
Tipper Gore
#90. Nick Nelson was first brandished with the moniker "the last of the nice guys" after leaving a pickup basketball game in 6th grade to help an elderly lady he didn't know, carry her groceries 17 blocks to her house.
Matt Micros
#91. 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
#92. Now, I know you expected me to say that, well, I just kick back in the rocking chair, fished a little bit, listened to Willie Nelson tapes and watched old baseball games on the Classic Sports network. And, tell you the truth, I have done that for maybe about five total minutes.
Dan Rather
#93. When I went to lobby Nelson Mandela while the post-apartheid constitution was being drafted, I asked him to endorse making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexuality. I'd been warned that he might giggle if I mentioned homosexuality.
Ian McKellen
#94. Nelson's Mandela own sense of himself was a very humble reading, [different] from how the world read him. And, quite often, you had the sense that he was not comfortable with all the accolades that would be.
Kumi Naidoo
#95. This may be a dream, but I'll say it anyway: I was supposed to be married last year, and I bought a gown. When I meet Nelson Mandela, I shall put on this gown and have the train of it removed and put aside, and kiss the ground that he walks on and then kiss his feet.
Nina Simone
#96. When Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York and one of the last of the WASP aristocrats, undertook a vast expansion of his state's university system, he did so, he said, because he thought that every citizen deserved an education that was just as good as the one that he'd received at Dartmouth.
William Deresiewicz
#97. Willie Nelson is not just a star or a headliner, he's a legend.
Lee Brice
#98. I think I, like most people, enjoy a wide variety of music. Yeah, I like some country stuff - old country stuff. I might not enjoy Billy Ray Cyrus or anything. But, you know, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, early Johnny Cash - absolutely.
Charlie Day
#99. From time to time, you have seminal personalities who really change the way the world sees itself - people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Warren Buffett is that kind of person in the business world.
Guy Spier
#100. Ricky Nelson ... I couldn't believe it when he died. He was a great rock star.
Dee Dee Ramone
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
