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.

The way sometimes we preach we make out that God is waiting eagerly to catch us out. It's not that way at all. I mean, it is extraordinary because it almost is as if God in fact wills us also to sin, but that is not true.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute - a white skin.

God hopes that we are going to love God back.

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.

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.

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'