Desmond Tutu Quotes
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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.
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Whether Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can't ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people.
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Resentment and anger are bad for your blood pressure and your digestion.
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Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
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People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.
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Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
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For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.
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We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.
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At home in South Africa I have sometimes said in big meetings where you have black and white together: 'Raise your hands!' Then I have said: 'Move your hands,' and I've said 'Look at your hands - different colors representing different people. You are the Rainbow People of God.'
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God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.
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God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
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You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.
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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.
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God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.
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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.
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I certainly know that I would not be able to survive if it were not for the fact that I am being upheld by the prayers of so many people.
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And every human being is precious.
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Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.
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We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.
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I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
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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.
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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.
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Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?
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Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.