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

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

We must return to the fundamentals; the fundamentals being that you count. That is where you start from. That you count; you matter for God. That is a fantastic realization, and one that very few of us actually get to accept.

We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.

When people decide they want to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.

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.'