Running taught me valuable lessons. In cross-country competition, training counted more than intrinsic ability, and I could compensate for a lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this in everything I did.

Success in politics demands that you must take your people into confidence about your views and state them very clearly, very politely, very calmly, but nevertheless, state them openly.

Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.

Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence ... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor.

Our freedom is also incomplete, dear compatriots, as long as we are denied our security by criminals who prey on our communities, who rob our businesses and undermine our economy, who ply their destructive trade in drugs in our schools, and who do violence against our women and children.

The first election in which all South Africans took part was in April, 1994. There were long queues [lines] of employers and employees, black and white. In the sense of Africans, Coloreds and Indians - when I talk about blacks, I mean those three. Blacks and whites mingled to vote without any hitches. Many people would have expected a great deal of tension, clashes and violence, but it did not occur.

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.