I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

I hate racial discrimination most intensely and all its manifestations. I have fought all my life; I fight now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one, whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a Black man in a White man's court. This should not be I should feel perfectly at ease and at home with the assurance that I am being tried by a fellow South African, who does not regard me as an inferior, entitled to a special type of justice.

Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence.

For me, survival is the ability to cope with difficulties, with circumstances, and to overcome them.

Millions of people in the world's poorest countries remain enslaved by the chains of poverty. It is time to set them free.