The worst thing that can happen to anybody in this cultural environment is to fail.

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.

Love is much more demanding than law.

Anywhere where the humanity of people is undermined, anywhere where people are left in the dust, there we will find our cause.

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.

I don't often want to speak. I try to be a reasonable person and to be diplomatic, but you go to that place and you see the settlements, you see what has happened to the land that was owned by the Palestinians.

South Africa, so utterly improbably, is a beacon of hope in a dark and troubled world.