Religious people should be very active if they believe that the world belongs to God, and politics is a very important part of the world, then they must participate in political affairs because they are alive. And if they don't act neither as the leaven or the salt or the light, then things can go horribly badly wrong.

Reconciliation is a long process. We don't have the kind of race clashes that we thought would happen. What we have is xenophobia, and it's very distressing. But maybe you ought to be lenient with us. We've been free for just 12 years.

People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation.

I wonder whether they have rum and Coke in Heaven? Maybe it's too mundane a pleasure, but I hope so -- as a sundowner. Except, of course, the sun never goes down there. Oh, man, this heaven is going to take some getting used to.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

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.'

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.