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Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that's where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

Desmond Tutu

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Desmond Tutu
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: October 7
Activist
Anglican Priest
Non-Fiction Writer
Archbisphop Desmond Tutu
Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Comes
Courage
Must
Already
Leader
Enemy
Guy
Talk
Constituency
Peace
Considerable
Hate
Confidence

More quotes by Desmond Tutu

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Ultimately, suffering is always political with all kinds of justifications - there are those who justify Israel's occupation of land as being a fulfillment of what God had promised.
Desmond Tutu
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In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute - a white skin.
Desmond Tutu
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All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.
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The sad problem is that we see ourselves as being quite terribly small. Instead of spending my time being envious, I need to celebrate your and my different gifts, even if mine are perhaps less spectacular than yours.
Desmond Tutu
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If you recall the happiest moments in your life, they are all from when you were doing something for somebody else.
Desmond Tutu
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It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ.
Desmond Tutu
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I'm coming to believe more and more in the truth that everything we do has consequences. A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear.
Desmond Tutu
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If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
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In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.
Desmond Tutu
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Consider what we sometimes do with our children: We imbue them with this sense, very early on, that they have got to succeed. We are not content that they just do well, they have got to wipe the floor with the opposition.
Desmond Tutu
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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.
Desmond Tutu
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In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.
Desmond Tutu
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My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity especially on the situation in Gaza shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma
Desmond Tutu
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Those of us who came to be Christians get to remember that forgiveness cost God the death of God's son. It's an expensive thing in many ways.
Desmond Tutu
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People are killed because they're gay. I don't think, What do I want to do today? I want to speak up on gay rights. No. It's God catching me by my neck. I wish I could keep quiet about the plight of the Palestinians. I can't!
Desmond Tutu
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Peace without justice is an impossibility.
Desmond Tutu
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There are things that must evoke our anger to show we care. It is what we do with that anger. If we direct that energy we can use it positively or destructively.
Desmond Tutu
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When you are in love you strive to do the things that will please your lover.
Desmond Tutu
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I think that because this is a moral universe, then right will prevail, goodness will prevail, compassion will prevail, laughter will prevail, love, caring, sharing will prevail. Because we are made for goodness. We are made for love.
Desmond Tutu
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If you are invisible, you are vulnerable. Birth Registration must be everyone's priority. Let's make all children visible and let's give every child a birthday!
Desmond Tutu