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As human beings, even if we were to have tried to forget the past, if you dealt with it in a cavalier fashion, it would return to haunt you.

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
Cavalier
Human
Haunt
Humans
Dealt
Even
Tried
Would
Beings
Return
Fashion
Forget

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Ubuntu tells us that we can create a more peaceful world by striving for goodness in each moment, wherever we are.
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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.
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Nothing is too much trouble for Love.
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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.
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Human beings can be awful, but they can also be tremendous.
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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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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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Every situation of justice is an occasion where someone is being humiliated and they want to restore their dignity. They think, I am a human being and I may not be able to defeat these people or destroy them, but I will hit out at them, because I am not a thing, I am human.
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Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.
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I will never tell anyone to pick up a gun. But I will pray for the man who picks up a gun, pray that he will be less cruel than he might otherwise have been.
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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.
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We can be human only together. A person is a person to other persons.
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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.
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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.
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Even the worst dictator, there is not a single one of them who would say Oh yes, I violate human rights. They all claim oh no, we respect human rights even when they are doing the most egregious things.
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God is trying to woo us into a love affair with God.
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Of course, you've got to reckon with the burden of the past. You can't just easily dismiss it. It is a legacy and often you have to carry an albatross. And it won't happen until people are able to have a certain level of trust and try to speak to each other, not as caricatures but as people.
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We are fundamentally good, and evil is an aberration.
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There are different kinds of justice. Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative - not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew.
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