Quote

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

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
Past
Allow
Made
Door
Looked
Asked
Doors
Imprison
Forget
Amends
Eye
Shut
Order
Forgiveness

More quotes by Desmond Tutu

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I have voted for the ANC, but I would very sadly not be able to vote for them after the way things have gone.
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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.
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Life is more than breath and a heartbeat meaning and purpose are the life of life.
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As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
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If we are going to bring about change, then men, for goodness sake, stand up and stand for the right. And I say, ‘power to the women.
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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.
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I hope that you will be amongst those young people who say we worked to change the world. We worked to make the world a more gentle, a more compassionate, a more caring world.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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I don't often want to speak. I try to be a reasonable person and to be diplomatic, but you go to that place and you see the settlements, you see what has happened to the land that was owned by the Palestinians.
Desmond Tutu
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Without forgiveness, there's no future.
Desmond Tutu
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You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.
Desmond Tutu
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Peace without justice is an impossibility.
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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Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.
Desmond Tutu
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Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.
Desmond Tutu
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I'm absolutely, utterly, and completely certain that God wouldn't be homophobic. I'd much rather go to hell - I really would much rather go to hell - than go to a homophobic heaven.
Desmond Tutu
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There are very good Christians who are compassionate and caring. And there are very bad Christians. You can say that about Islam, about Hinduism, about any faith. That is why I was saying that it was not the faith per se but the adherent. People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.
Desmond Tutu