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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

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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
Future
Spiritual
Realpolitik
Sense
Ethereal
Without
Reconciliation
Real
Worldly
World
Activities
Forgiveness
Activity

More quotes by Desmond Tutu

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Forgiveness is something that we are often asked to grant and very few of us ever have the roadmap of how to get from the pain that we have experienced to being able to forgive someone.
Desmond Tutu
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We are made for loving. If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water.
Desmond Tutu
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When a fire starts in one it just races through. And that is in a way unconscionable.
Desmond Tutu
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As a Christian, I believe in the sanctity of life and that death is a part of life.
Desmond Tutu
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Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC's military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.
Desmond Tutu
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Europe became rich because it exploited Africa and the Africans know that.
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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I think that most of us would say that ubuntu basically speaks about what it means to be human.
Desmond Tutu
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We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water.
Desmond Tutu
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If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.
Desmond Tutu
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God says, Please, please help me realize this dream. And some of God's best collaborators are the young, because you dream. You dream God's dream.
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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There is only one way to eat an elephant, a bite at a time.
Desmond Tutu
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Twenty-five years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse. No more can it be dismissed as science fiction we are already feeling the effects.
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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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.
Desmond Tutu
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As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
Desmond Tutu
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I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.
Desmond Tutu
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I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
Desmond Tutu
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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.
Desmond Tutu