Quote

Don't raise your voice, improve your argument. [Address at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 November 2004]

Desmond Tutu

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Desmond Tutu
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: October 7
Activist
Anglican Priest
Non-Fiction Writer
Archbisphop Desmond Tutu
Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Africa
Improve
Johannesburg
Raise
Mandela
Raises
Nelson
Argument
Shouting
Foundation
November
South
Address
Voice
Addresses

More quotes by Desmond Tutu

Image
We are living in an historic moment. We are each called to take part in a great transformation. Our survival as a species is threatened by global warming, economic meltdown, and an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor. Yet these threats offer an opportunity to awaken as an interconnected and beloved community.
Desmond Tutu
Image
We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.
Desmond Tutu
Image
We can arrive at better solutions to any problem or pain together, than we can by ourselves. The beauty of the modern age is that you are able to source answers, and sometimes the genius is in the combination of ideas and energy that does not reside in only one person.
Desmond Tutu
Image
Most poor people I know are proud and really want not a handout but a hand up. They do have an inherent pride and dignity, and we should treat them as those who have fallen on bad days.
Desmond Tutu
Image
We have an extraordinary God. God is a mighty God, but this God needs you. When someone is hungry, bread doesn't come down from heaven. When God wants to feed the hungry, you and I must feed the hungry. And now God wants peace in the world.
Desmond Tutu
Image
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.
Desmond Tutu
Image
Some people are able to use Bible as a means of opposing injustice, whereas others are able to find justification.
Desmond Tutu
Image
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
Image
I can't control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it.
Desmond Tutu
Image
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
Image
When a chap is in love, he will go out in all kinds of weather to keep an appointment with his beloved. Love can be demanding, in fact more demanding than law. It has its own imperatives - think of a mother sitting by the bedside of a sick child through the night, impelled only by love. Nothing is too much trouble for love.
Desmond Tutu
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Each of us has a God-shaped space within us. Only God can fill that space. But we run ourselves ragged trying to find things other than God to fill it with.
Desmond Tutu
Image
Forgiving is a gift to the forgiver as well as to the perpetrator.
Desmond Tutu
Image
My flock is black, my flock is white. One has got to say to our people, I love you. I care for you, enormously. And when I care about black liberation, it is because I care about white liberation.
Desmond Tutu
Image
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
Image
If you recall the happiest moments in your life, they are all from when you were doing something for somebody else.
Desmond Tutu
Image
But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.
Desmond Tutu
Image
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
Desmond Tutu