Desmond Tutu Quotes

I have absolutely no objection to performance and success as long as they don't become false idols and threaten to rule our lives.

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

To forgive is to abandon your right to pay back the predator in his own coin, but it is the loss that Liberates.

Most people would say "Ah, Mahatma Gandhi, what a wonderful man, Mother Teresa, maybe Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama." And when you look at those people it's not the macho, aggressive, successful people, we may envy them, their bank balances and kind of thing, yes and for being successful. But we do not revere them.

You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.

You might have thought that a world such as ours, so hard-nosed and cynical and brash, would have very little time for transcendence, spiritual values of goodness and compassion, gentleness, and caring, but we actually do experience them.

I can't control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it.

I give great thanks to God that he has created a Dalai Lama. Do you really think, as some have argued, that God will be saying: 'You know, that guy, the Dalai Lama, is not bad. What a pity he's not a Christian'? I don't think that is the case - because, you see, God is not a Christian.

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

When will we learn, when will the people of the world get up and say, Enough is enough. God created us for fellowship. God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril.

There’s no question about the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering, but at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love. That you and I and all of us are incredible. I mean, we really are remarkable things. That we are, as a matter of fact, made for goodness.

We have an incredible capacity for the worst possible evil, all of us, it was that we also have this incredible capacity for good. And that is why we are all of us appalled when something bad happens. Because if the bad was the norm, we would just shrug our shoulders and say "well tough luck, this is how the cookie crumbles" kind of thing but none of us does that.

In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is. Not how much we love Him but how much He loves us. And God loves us whoever we are, whatever we’ve done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can’t.

Though wrong gratifies in the moment, good yields its gifts over a lifetime.

God is trying to woo us into a love affair with God.

Despite all of the ghastliness in the world, human beings are made for goodness. The ones that are held in high regard are not militarily powerful, nor even economically prosperous. They have a commitment to try and make the world a better place.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

Serve others. The failing recipe for happiness and success is to want the good of others.

Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

God says "I have given you this gift, and it is a real gift. I want you to love me freely, and I will do anything, anything up to giving up the most precious thing I could say I have, my son, to prove I love you. Please come back."

The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.

The world's forests are a shared stolen treasure that we must put back for our children's future

The future of our fragile, beautiful planet home is in our hands. As God's family, we are stewards of God's creation. We can be wantonly irresponsible, or we can be caring and compassionate. God says, "I have set before you life and death... Choose life."

And God says to all of us, you are no chicken; you are an eagle. Fly, eagle, fly. And God wants us to shake ourselves, spread our pinions, and then lift off and soar and rise, and rise toward the confident and the good and the beautiful. Rise towards the compassionate and the gentle and the caring. Rise to become what God intends us to be - eagles, not chickens.

Too many people think that reconciliation means you soft-pedal differences.

I think that most of us would say that ubuntu basically speaks about what it means to be human.

Because there is global insecurity, nations are engaged in a mad arms race, spending billions of dollars wastefully on instruments of destruction, when millions are starving. And yet, just a fraction of what is expended so obscenely on defense budgets would make the difference in enabling God's children to fill their stomachs, be educated, and given the chance to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.

I have seen firsthand how injustice gets overlooked when the victims are powerless or vulnerable, when they have no one to speak up for them and no means of representing themselves to a higher authority. Animals are in precisely that position. Unless we are mindful of their interests and speak out loudly on their behalf, abuse and cruelty go unchallenged.

To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good.

We get most upset with those we love because they are close to us and we know that they are aware of our weaknesses. . . If only we could learn to live with our inadequacies, our frailties, our vulnerabilities, we would not need to try so hard to push away those who really know us.

God says, "Please, please help me realize this dream." And some of God's best collaborators are the young, because you dream. You dream God's dream.

Suffering is part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble us. It can ennoble us and become a spirituality of transformation when we find meaning in it.

Being formed into a nation takes some doing.

When a fire starts in one it just races through. And that is in a way unconscionable.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

Nursing a grudge is bad for your heath.

Children learn about the nature of the world from their family. They learn about power and about justice, about peace and about compassion within the family. Whether we oppress or liberate our children in our relationships with them will determine whether they grow up to oppress and be oppressed or to liberate and be liberated.

Look at Nelson Mandela. Why did people want to follow him? He's a lousy speaker. If he hadn't got all the other things, you wouldn't spend time listening to him. But people actually don't listen to what he's saying, in a way. They are listening to him because he has communicated that he is ready to put his life on the line.

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

I'm coming to believe more and more in the truth that everything we do has consequences. A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear.

Dream of a world where children can laugh and play and not be blown up by a mine they thought was a toy.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

Human beings can be awful, but they can also be tremendous.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene.

My flock is black, my flock is white. One has got to say to our people, "I love you. I care for you, enormously." And when I care about black liberation, it is because I care about white liberation.

Love is universal. You don't have to tell somebody that loving is better than hating. You don't have to believe in God to know that stealing is bad. All of God's children and their different faiths help to realize the immensity of God. No faith contains the whole truth about God. And certainly Christians don't have a corner on God. All of us belong to God.

Jesus could weep. Sometimes when you look at the ugliness that makes you weep, you know that the heart of God is also weeping. Jesus is for real. He does not give up on anyone, least of all on me.