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Desmond Tutu Quotes
1931–2021 South Africa
Desmond Tutu (7 October 1931 – 26 December 2021) was a South African social rights activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. He was the first black Archbishop of Cape Town and bishop of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (now the Anglican Church of Southern Africa).
South Africa Academics Nobel laureates Non-fiction authors Theologians Also known as: Desmond M. Tutu, Desmond Mpilo Tutu, Tutu, Desmond
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59 quotes
You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.
A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
I give great thanks to God that he has created a Dalai Lama.
I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period.
Freedom and liberty lose out by default because good people are not vigilant.
Hope and Suffering: Sermons and Speeches (1984)
All are to be held in the incredible embrace of the love that won’t let us go.
We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.
Speech (1985)
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
Some of my friends are skeptical when they hear me say this, but I am by nature a person who dislikes confrontation.
God Is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations (2011)
Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
It is as if Jesus wanted among other things to point out that life is a bit more complex; it has too many ambivalences and ambiguities to allow always for a straightforward and simplistic answer.
God Is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations (2011)
South Africa, so utterly improbably, is a beacon of hope in a dark and troubled world.
God has such a deep reverence for our freedom that he'd rather let us freely go to Hell than be compelled to go to Heaven.
This family has no outsiders. Everyone is an insider.
For perhaps the first time in history, we have the resources, the know-how and the technology to make starvation and dependency relics of the past. But do we have the will?
Without forgiveness there can be no future for a relationship between individuals or within and between nations.
Resentment and anger are bad for your blood pressure and your digestion.
Forgiveness is an absolute necessity for continued human existence.
Without Forgiveness There Is No Future (1998)
I am fifty-two years of age. I am a bishop in the Anglican Church, and a few people might be constrained to say that I was reasonably responsible.
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