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Forgiveness is abandoning your right to revenge.

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
Abandoning
Revenge
Forgiveness
Politics
Right

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?
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God looks at the Middle East, looks at Palestine. When you go to the Holy Land and see what's being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it's the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa.
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Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.
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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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In terms of the New Testament the Jews must suffer, therefore we will put it into practice if we will in charge and there will be no sympathy for the Jews when the blacks take over.
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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.
Desmond Tutu
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We can enjoy a self-assurance that doesn't depend on the state of things outside ourselves, be it downturns or booms or whatever.
Desmond Tutu
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I believe history teaches us a categorical lesson: that once a people are determined to become free, then nothing in the world can stop them reaching their goal.
Desmond Tutu
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When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, Now is that political or social? He said, I feed you. Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.
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True reconciliation is never cheap, for it is based on forgiveness which is costly. Forgiveness in turn depends on repentance, which has to be based on an acknowledgment of what was done wrong, and therefore on disclosure of the truth. You cannot forgive what you do not know.
Desmond Tutu
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It is quite exhilarating to speak about a God who has an incredible bias, a notorious bias in favor of the downtrodden. You look at Exodus and the Israelites' escape from a bottomless pit. God is not evenhanded. God is biased up to his eyebrows.
Desmond Tutu
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I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.
Desmond Tutu
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Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.
Desmond Tutu
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You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.
Desmond Tutu
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One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don't have a history that they have no roots.
Desmond Tutu
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Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.
Desmond Tutu
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I'm so, so thrilled that [Pope Francis] is there at this crucial moment in the history of our world.
Desmond Tutu