Desmond Tutu Quotes

Our parents will maybe sometimes when they are upset with us and we have been troublesome say something like "Mommy really doesn't like a naughty child." And we think that we have to earn the approval, earn the love of our parents. And then we transfer it to God and think we have to earn... We don't have to earn it! God loves us.

Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another, and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.

God says "This is what I would love you to be, but I am not going to constrain you. I want it to be your choice." And it is a fantastic thing because even at the moment when I am making the choice to reject God, I would depend from moment to moment, you know that beautiful image of God creating by breathing God's breath into this lump of clay, making it a human being.

If I diminish you, I diminish myself

Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin.

The fossil reserves that have already been discovered exceed what can ever be safely used. Yet companies spend half a trillion dollars each year searching for more fuel. They should redirect this money toward developing clean energy solutions

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.

I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.

You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.

Instead of growing old gracefully, at home with my family - reading and writing and praying and thinking - too much of my time has been spent at airports and in hotels.

The acknowledgement that this person is English, white, or French, or German, this is Portuguese, this is Rwandan, this is Senegalese, this is a black South Africans is a glorious thing. To speak of those positively, to say that they have characteristics, each one of them, that the others almost always do not have, and that there is a complementarily about it.

We give kudos to people who have succeeded. We don't care in what they succeeded as long as they succeeded. The worst thing that can happen to anybody in this cultural environment is to fail.

God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

My vote is my secret.

People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.

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

I don't know any religion that promotes violence. It is the adherents of whatever religion.

The time has now come to slow down, to sip Rooibos tea with my beloved wife in the afternoons, to watch cricket, to travel to visit my children and grandchildren, rather than to conferences and conventions and university campuses.

The truth of who we are is that we are because we belong.

Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart.

If we have loved well while we were alive, there is life after death here-our love will go on for generations.

In most, when you go to church, most churches when they have images of the good shepherd, they show Jesus carrying a nice fluffy lamb. Now fluffy little lambs don't stray from their mommy's. The sheep that will stray is the most obstreperous, troublesome one.

If you recall the happiest moments in your life, they are all from when you were doing something for somebody else.

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.

When the humility of someone is undermined, whether I like it or not mine is undermined as well.

When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

Forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up and get up with dignity, to begin anew.

The destruction of the earth’s environment is the human rights challenge of our time.

There are levels of poverty in South Africa that are totally unacceptable.

Once lost, trust can only be regained if we are as good as our word.

God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.

There are people who go to bed hungry, and that is unconscionable.

Love your enemy; it will ruin his reputation.

Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.

We spend billions on banks when we know that a fraction of this money could save all the children in the world.

Forgiving is good for your health.

God looks at the Middle East, looks at Palestine. When you go to the Holy Land and see what's being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it's the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa.

There's no way in which you can ever win a war against terror. As long as there are conditions in many parts of the world that make people desperate: poverty, disease, ignorance, etc. I hope that we will discover soon, that we can survive, only together. We can prosper only together. And I think people are beginning to realize this, that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think you can have a stable, secure world.

A leader is someone you are not disappointed in placing trust in. When that person makes suggestions, you are inclined to trust [them]. Often it is people who have been there [in a similar situation to the people he or she is leading]. They would generally be people who are ready to take the risks themselves. Most leaders would be people who don't ever give commands and remain at home and let the foot soldiers be the ones who bear the brunt.

You ask when is it that you can say yes we have had enough. It is enough revenge and I think now we have restored the equilibrium. It never happens!

Now that they talk about Islam as being a violent faith, when you look at the history of Christendom, the Crusades and the many wars of religion that were fought, the cruelty of Christians in burning what they believed to be witches and burning heretics, and then very recently they were responsible for the Holocaust... it was Christians.

The only separation the Bible knows is between believers on the one hand and unbelievers on the other. Any other kind of separation, division, disunity is of the devil. It is evil and from sin.

Africans believe in something that is difficult to render in English. We call it ubuntu, botho. It means the essence of being human. You know when it is there and when it is absent. It speaks about humaneness, gentleness, hospitality, putting yourself out on behalf of others, being vulnerable. It embraces compassion and toughness. It recognizes that my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

When a chap is in love, he will go out in all kinds of weather to keep an appointment with his beloved. Love can be demanding, in fact more demanding than law. It has its own imperatives - think of a mother sitting by the bedside of a sick child through the night, impelled only by love. Nothing is too much trouble for love.

Most of the leading figures of the Old Testament were polygamists. Abraham had several wives and concubines. If they wanted, they could say this was approved in the Bible.

We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water.

Without forgiveness, there is no future.

The things [Pope Francis] has done in a short period of time: the fact that he does not live in a huge papal mansion and just dropped by in the dining room where ordinary people have meals. You think of his background, where he didn't use limousines in South America, that he used public transport.