Top 100 South African Sayings
#1. Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
Nelson Mandela
#2. 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
#3. When you sit in America you miss the open plains and you miss the sound of rain and the smell of rain and the smell of the veld. If you're African it's different and I don't think one will ever become an American or British. It doesn't matter where you move, you will always be a South African,
Zola Budd
#4. For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.
Arundhati Roy
#5. I have strong views about South African politics and I still don't feel I need to make public statements.
Zola Budd
#6. I'm always very proud of belonging to three minorities: gay, Jewish, white South African.
Antony Sher
#7. South African history did not start in 1652.
Nick Wood
#8. We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.
Gilbert Hernandez
#9. A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world!
E.L. Doctorow
#10. I just wanted to sing, and I didn't want my music to be unique to the US. I wanted Africans to hear it and know that South African music was still alive.
Letta Mbulu
#11. THE SOUTH AFRICAN ARMED FORCES RECEIVED EVER-HIGHER amounts of funding from an economy that couldn't afford it. In the end, a fifth of the country's hopelessly unbalanced budget was going to the military, all while the rest of the world came up with new embargoes.
Jonas Jonasson
#12. I know exactly what I will do. I will go and work with the Congress of South African Students.
Kgalema Motlanthe
#13. WOMEN must be at the forefront of nation-building to bring the South African citizenry together and, therefore, develop a whole new ethos of human co-existence
Steven Biko
#14. The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.
Athol Fugard
#15. The people I mixed with in Monaco didn't relate to my South African mentality or humor ... Although I have met some wonderful people since I've been living in Monaco, I regard them all as acquaintances. I only have two people I consider friends here.
Charlene, Princess Of Monaco
#16. South African rugby doesn't have to stand back for anyone.
Rudolph Straeuli
#17. In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.
Noam Chomsky
#18. I heard somebody say, 'Where's (Nelson) Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead. Because Saddam killed all the Mandelas.
George W. Bush, on the former South African president, who is still very much alive, Washington, D.C., Sept. 20, 2007
George W. Bush
#19. The South African native is probably the one impossible person to train in the entire world; he is probably impossible by any human standard.
L. Ron Hubbard
#20. 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
#21. As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis.
John Gurdon
#22. South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
J.M. Coetzee
#24. As long as many of our people still live in utter poverty, as long as children still live under plastic covers, as long as many of our people are still without jobs, no South African should rest and wallow in the joy of freedom.
Nelson Mandela
#25. I look at a stream and I see myself: a native South African, flowing irresistibly over hard obstacles until they become smooth and, one day, disappear - flowing from an origin that has been forgotten toward an end that will never be.
Miriam Makeba
#26. Reacher nodded. "For a spell." Then he said: "Plato is a weird name for a Mexican, don't you think? Sounds more like a Brazilian name to me." "No, Yugoslavian," Peterson said. "Like that old dictator." "That was Tito." "I thought he was a South African bishop." "That was Tutu.
Lee Child
#27. Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
Nadine Gordimer
#28. As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.
Stephen Fry
#29. Let us join hands and build a truly South African nation.
Nelson Mandela
#30. I can't be a South African without being an African first.
Evans Biya
#31. Positive social awareness among the South African educated half-caste is zero. Teaching is a mechanical job. The best way of earning a living.
Peter Abrahams
#32. He just rubs people up the wrong way in a short space of time and, after he'd gone, one of the South African coaches there said to me in a thick Bok accent 'You see, Richard, what we have to put up with?'
Richard Loe
#33. If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,
Ehud Olmert
#34. 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
#35. My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.
Peter Abrahams
#36. Many South African tribes used extracts from the African bush willow to heal the sick.
Bob Pettit
#37. From time to time, there are people in the film industry who appear on the horizon with a unique vision. South African director Neill Blomkamp is one of those rare people.
Ridley Scott
#38. Braai Day is a slap in the face of our efforts to regain who we are. And should make any self respecting South African cringe.
Simphiwe Dana
#39. 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
#40. I use a 1994 South African 5 rand coin to mark my ball. It reminds me of my '94 U.S. Open win at Oakmont.
Ernie Els
#41. 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
#42. The best tribute we can pay Madiba is to ensure that our political debate focuses on issues of how best we can ensure that each South African child, whatever the circumstances of their birth, inherits freedom they can use.
Helen Zille
#43. I heard the South African 'keeper had been killed and I thought it was probably one of their former goalkeepers, but when I confirmed it was Senzo Meyiwa, I was shattered.
Stephen Keshi
#44. I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.
Damon Galgut
#45. You're a white South African, and right away you have to explain yourself. Occasionally, I get hassled until I explain my point of view. I have to make it clear that I don't live there anymore, and I don't approve of the brutal racial policies.
Trevor Rabin
#46. The histories of our two peoples, Palestinian and South African, correspond in such painful and poignant ways, that I intensely feel myself being at home amongst compatriots
Nelson Mandela
#47. As a South African I honestly cannot understand how people can't see South Africa as a unique nation, untied by ties of history, bonds of suffering, victory, struggles, hope - and in more ways than I ever before thought possible - blood.
Christina Engela
#48. In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land,
Miriam Makeba
#49. The contemporary music of Tina Turner might make you feel powerful and energized. South African music provides a mind-boggling choice of styles from folk tunes to jive. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony has the magical ability to transport you to a country scene and trap you in a driving rain storm.
Jason Harvey
#50. I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian.
Liev Schreiber
#51. I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.
Damon Galgut
#52. If you are truly telling a South African story then it will be political - because you are dealing with people who lead political lives in an environment which is highly politically charged.
Zakes Mda
#53. South African schoolchildren set a world record this week by creating the world's longest clothesline. Hey, what do South Africans wash their clothes with? Apar-Tide!
Dennis Miller
#54. [To the South African parliament:] I do not know why we equate - and with the examples before us - a white skin with civilization.
Helen Suzman
#55. I think a legitimate target is the enemy and [the] enemy is basically in uniform, but not all [are] in Uniform. For example in the rural areas, our judgement is that virtually the whole farming community is part of the South African Defence Force.
Joe Slovo
#56. I turned pro and won Rookie of the Year on the South African Tour and then it took me two tries at the qualifying school on the European Tour and to get my card and the rest is history.
Retief Goosen
#57. About a year ago, an entire suburb in this man's jurisdiction turned from the police and erected a substitute agency. To all intents and purposes, several thousand people here have severed their relationship with the South African Police Service. He appears not to have noticed.
Jonny Steinberg
#58. I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.
Miriam Makeba
#59. Our history is responsible for the differences in the South African way of life.
P. W. Botha
#60. This is hardly a South African problem, of course. We are confronting nothing less than a global system of brutal misogyny. Too many men across the world see too many women as repositories of their rage, frustration, narcissism or simply their will to enact violence.
Dave Zirin
#61. I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.
Desmond Tutu
#62. Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.
Damon Galgut
#64. The toughest challenge I faced came right at the beginning of my career with 'Blood Knot,' which was trying to convince South African audiences that South African stories also had a place on the stage.
Athol Fugard
#65. As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are.
Antony Sher
#66. The problem of South Africa is different than the world thinks. There is no native problem. The native worker gets more than white workers do in England! [ ... ] The South African government is not a police state. It's easier on people than the United States government!
L. Ron Hubbard
#67. Abe Krok was a man of integrity who made a unique contribution to Mamelodi Sundowns and to South African football.
Patrice Motsepe
#68. Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.
Dave Matthews
#69. 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
#70. Crime is fast destroying the moral fabric of South African cities, and is becoming a major threat to South African democracy as well as the prominent manifestation of a "class war" that is largely a continuation of the "race war" of yesterday.
Achille Mbembe
#71. When we rise in the morning ... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#72. Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.
Ketch Secor
#73. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#74. The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.
Zora Neale Hurston
#75. We view South Africa as one of our closest strategic partners in the developing world and in the African continent.
Pratibha Patil
#77. In the criminal law [ ... ] imprisonment should be resorted to only after the most anxious consideration.
Pius Langa
#78. I say, then, that viewed from that standpoint, there is but one single subject of complaint which Virginia has to make against the government under which we live; a complaint made by the whole South, and that is on the subject of African slavery ...
John Brown Baldwin
#79. In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too.
Lawrence Hill
#80. The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.
James Heckman
#81. Our economy is a hundred times better, than the average African economy. Outside South Africa, what country is [as good as] Zimbabwe? ... What is lacking now are goods on the shelves-that is all.
Robert Mugabe
#82. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.
Mary Landrieu
#83. He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.
Colson Whitehead
#84. I am very proud to be African. I want to defend African people, and I want to show to the world that African players can be as good as the Europeans and South Americans.
Yaya Toure
#85. From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.
Nelson Mandela
#86. All people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.
Kwame Nkrumah
#87. Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.
Mick Jagger
#88. a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?
Erik Larson
#89. The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.
Jared Diamond
#90. There was a lot of feeling that with an African-American president, life on the South Side of Chicago would be radically different.
Mark Kirk
#91. Plainly it is not every error made by a witness which affects his credibility. In each case the trier of fact has to make an evaluation; taking into account such matters as the nature of the contradictions, their number and importance, and their bearing on other parts of the witness's evidence.
H.C. Nicholas
#92. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#93. My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.
Cory Booker
#94. You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.
George Takei
#95. The music that I listen to the most is probably world music, whether it's from African or South America or all over.
St. Lucia
#96. The U.S. has taken an active role in wars from Libya to the Central African Republic, sent special ops forces into countries from Somalia to South Sudan, conducted airstrikes and abduction missions, even put boots on the ground in countries where it pledged it would not.
Nick Turse
#97. While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.
Eric Holder
#98. Today we are a nation at peace with itself, united in our diversity, not only proclaiming but living out the contention that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. We take our place amongst the nations of the world, confident and proud in being an African country.
Nelson Mandela
#99. South Africans are caring, compassionate and loving people.
Patrice Motsepe
#100. The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
Bill Gates
