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Human beings are fundamentally good.

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
Fundamentally
Beings
Human
Humans
Good

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.
Desmond Tutu
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How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?
Desmond Tutu
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We will only truly be free when those in bondage are finally free
Desmond Tutu
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For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.
Desmond Tutu
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There is no justice in killing in the name of justice.
Desmond Tutu
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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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Don't raise your voice, improve your argument. [Address at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 November 2004]
Desmond Tutu
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We need to be accountable to God's family. Once we start living in a way that is people-friendly to all of God's family, we will also be environment-friendly.
Desmond Tutu
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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.
Desmond Tutu
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We mustn't romanticize suffering. It can turn people bitter and hard, although it does seem to have been almost indispensable in making people into the kind of leaders that we admire.
Desmond Tutu
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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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The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.
Desmond Tutu
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To treat anyone as if they were less than human, less than a brother or a sister, no matter what they have done, is to contravene the very laws of our humanity.
Desmond Tutu
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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.
Desmond Tutu
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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
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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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There is no situation that is not transformable. There is no person who is hopeless. There is no set of circumstances that cannot be turned about by ordinary human beings and their natural capacity for love of the deepest sort.
Desmond Tutu
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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.
Desmond Tutu
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Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility.
Desmond Tutu
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You think sometimes that maybe if the person who hurt you is clobbered you will feel a little better. But it actually doesn't.
Desmond Tutu