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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
Must
Already
Leader
Enemy
Guy
Talk
Constituency
Peace
Considerable
Hate
Confidence
Comes
Courage

More quotes by Desmond Tutu

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We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.
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
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I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now, so obviously wrong
Desmond Tutu
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We get most upset with those we love because they are close to us and we know that they are aware of our weaknesses. . . If only we could learn to live with our inadequacies, our frailties, our vulnerabilities, we would not need to try so hard to push away those who really know us.
Desmond Tutu
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Without forgiveness, there is no future. Forgiveness is not nebulous, impractical and idealistic. It's thoroughly realistic. It's real political in the long run.
Desmond Tutu
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It is very difficult now in South Africa to find anyone who ever supported apartheid.
Desmond Tutu
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Despite all of the ghastliness in the world, human beings are made for goodness. The ones that are held in high regard are not militarily powerful, nor even economically prosperous. They have a commitment to try and make the world a better place.
Desmond Tutu
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For both the offender and the victim, the pain is there, often unacknowledged and that is when it can cause harm through festering. When I ignore a physical wound, it does not go away. No, it festers and goes bad.
Desmond Tutu
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Forgiveness is abandoning your right to revenge.
Desmond Tutu
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I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone . . . I think, myself, that it is an obscenity . . .
Desmond Tutu
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Too frequently we think we have to do spectacular things. Yet if we remember that the sea is actually made up of drops of water and each drop counts, each one of us can do our little bit where we are. Those little bits can come together and almost overwhelm the world. Each one of us can be an oasis of peace.
Desmond Tutu
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Nothing is too much trouble for Love.
Desmond Tutu
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Most of the leading figures of the Old Testament were polygamists. Abraham had several wives and concubines. If they wanted, they could say this was approved in the Bible.
Desmond Tutu
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I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.
Desmond Tutu
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Whether you want to say Israel practices apartheid is immaterial. They are doing things, given their history, you think, Do you remember what happened to you? Then they clobber you and say, You are anti-Semitic.
Desmond Tutu
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To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice.
Desmond Tutu
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The world's forests are a shared stolen treasure that we must put back for our children's future
Desmond Tutu
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Resentment and anger are bad for your blood pressure and your digestion.
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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Forgiveness and reconciliation are not just ethereal, spiritual, other-worldly activities. They have to do with the real world. They are realpolitik, because in a very real sense, without forgiveness, there is no future.
Desmond Tutu