Great Throughts Treasury

"Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden."

"Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back."

"Resentment and anger are bad for your blood pressure and your digestion."

"Reconciliation is a long process. We don't have the kind of race clashes that we thought would happen. What we have is xenophobia, and it's very distressing. But maybe you ought to be lenient with us. We've been free for just 12 years."

"Some of my friends are skeptical when the hear me say this, but I am by nature a person who dislikes confrontation. I have consciously sought during my lifetime to emulate my mother, whom our family knew as a gentle comforter of the afflicted. However, when I see innocent people suffering, pushed around by the rich and the powerful, then, as the prophet Jeremiah, says, if I try to keep quiet is is as if the word of God burned like a fire in my breast. I feel compelled to speak out, sometimes to even argue with God over how a loving creator can allow this to happen. In the Church of Sant'Egido in Rome, home of an extraordinary community of lay people devoted to working with the poor, there is an old crucifix that portrays Christ without arms. When I asked about its importance to the community, I was told that it shows how God relies on us to do God's work in the world."

"South Africa, so utterly improbably, is a beacon of hope in a dark and troubled world."

"Sometimes you want to whisper in God's ear, God, we know you are in charge, but why don't you make it slightly more obvious?"

"The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated."

"The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it - oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible."

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

"The time has now come to slow down, to sip Rooibos tea with my beloved wife in the afternoons, to watch cricket, to travel to visit my children and grandchildren, rather than to conferences and conventions and university campuses."

"The reprisal against the suicide bomber does not bring peace. There is a suicide bomber, a reprisal and then a counter-reprisal. And it just goes on and on."

"The universe can take quite a while to deliver."

"Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems."

"This family has no outsiders. Everyone is an insider. When Jesus said, I, if I am lifted up, will draw... Did he say, I will draw some? I will draw some, and tough luck for the others? He said, I, if I be lifted up, will draw all. All! All! All! – Black, white, yellow; rich, poor; clever, not so clever; beautiful, not so beautiful. All! All! It is radical. All! Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Bush – all! All! All are to be held in this incredible embrace. Gay, lesbian, so-called straight; all! All!All are to be held in the incredible embrace of the love that won’t let us go."

"There is nothing more difficult than waking someone who is only pretending to be asleep."

"There are different kinds of justice. Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative — not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew."

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

"Universal education is not only a moral imperative but an economic necessity, to pave the way toward making many more nations self-sufficient and self-sustaining."

"We Africans should hang our heads in shame. How can what is happening in Zimbabwe elicit hardly a word of concern let alone condemnation from us leaders of Africa? After the horrible things done to hapless people in Harare, has come the recent crackdown on members of the opposition ... what more has to happen before we who are leaders, religious and political, of our mother Africa are moved to cry out Enough is enough?"

"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.'"

"We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths."

"We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God's family."

"We are made for loving. If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water."

"We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land."

"We learn from history that we don't learn from history!"

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

"We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity."

"We refuse to be treated as the doormat for the government to wipe its jackboots on."

"We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers."

"We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful... and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things."

"We used to say to the apartheid government: you may have the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come: join the winning side. His Holiness and the Tibetan people are on the winning side."

"What an awful blot on our copy book. Do we really care about human rights, do we care that people of flesh and blood, fellow Africans, are being treated like rubbish, almost worse than they were ever treated by rabid racists?"

"We who advocate peace are becoming an irrelevance when we speak peace. The government speaks rubber bullets, live bullets, tear gas, police dogs, detention, and death."

"We would like to see you departing peacefully."

"What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?"

"When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said Let us pray. We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land."

"What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong."

"When a pile of cups is tottering on the edge of the table and you warn that they will crash to the ground, in South Africa you are blamed when that happens."

"When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil."

"When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others."

"When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish."

"Without us, God has no eyes, without us, God has no ears; without us, God has no arms or hands. God relies on us. Won't you join other people of faith in becoming God's partners in the world?"

"Without forgiveness there can be no future for a relationship between individuals or within and between nations."

"Without forgiveness, there's no future."

"You and I are created for transcendence, laughter, caring. God deliberately did not make the world perfect, for God is looking for you and me to be fellow workers with God."

"You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them."

"You have to understand that the Bible is really a library of books and it has different categories of material. There are certain parts which you have to say no to. The Bible accepted slavery. St Paul said women should not speak in church at all and there are people who have used that to say women should not be ordained. There are many things that you shouldn't accept."

"You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate — poverty, disease, ignorance, et cetera. I think people are beginning to realize that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think that you can have a stable and secure world."

"You must show the world that you abhor fighting."