I can't pretend that I'm brave and that I can beat the whole world.

Do not allow your anger to control your reason, but rather your reason to control your anger.

If you want the cooperation of humans around you, you must make them feel they are important - and you do that by being genuine and humble.

To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of huger and deprivation is to dehumanize them. But such has been the terrible fate of all black persons in our country under the system of apartheid.

I will use the rest of my life to help the poor overcome the problems confronting them - poverty is the greatest challenge facing humanity. That is why I build schools; I want to free people from poverty and illiteracy.

It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to their own subjective canon.

Continuously, we have to fight to defeat the primitive tendency towards the glorification of arms, the adulation of force, born of the illusion that injustice can be perpetuated by the capacity to kill, or that disputes are necessarily best resolved by resort to violent means.