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Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.

Desmond Tutu

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Desmond Tutu
Age: 92
Born: 1931
Born: October 7
Activist
Anglican Priest
Non-Fiction Writer
Archbisphop Desmond Tutu
Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Happened
Forgiveness
Means
Seriously
Doe
Drawing
Done
Memory
Mean
Entire
Taking
Condoning
Memories
Sting
Existence
Threatens

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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.
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Too many people think that reconciliation means you soft-pedal differences.
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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.
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To forgive is to abandon your right to pay back the predator in his own coin, but it is the loss that Liberates.
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Peace without justice is an impossibility.
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I have often said to my Jewish friends: Please just remember where you come from. Remember Yahweh, who said to the Israelites, 'Treat the alien well with justice.' Almost all of the passion that we have has come from the inspiration that we have got from the Jewish Scriptures.
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There are two forms of justice. There is what is called retributive justice and there is restorative justice.
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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.
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Naming a center after a person who is still alive can make it seem that an individual somehow on their own was able to accomplish what he accomplished.
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Do your little bit of good where you are.
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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.
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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.
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Without memory, there is no healing. Without forgiveness, there is no future.
Desmond Tutu
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You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.
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Most of the leading figures of the Old Testament were polygamists. Abraham had several wives and concubines. If they wanted, they could say this was approved in the Bible.
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I'm coming to believe more and more in the truth that everything we do has consequences. A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear.
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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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Suffering is part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble us. It can ennoble us and become a spirituality of transformation when we find meaning in it.
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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.
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Human beings have a vested interest in being trustworthy.
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