Quotes about South Africa
If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness.
— Nelson Mandela
Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans. I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all! I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.
— Nelson Mandela
I remembered seeing the lines of people who had waited for hours and hours to vote in the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The lines snaked on for miles. I remember wondering at the time, as U.S. voter turnout was hovering under forty percent, how long that sense of joy and appreciation for the right to vote would last and whether there was any way to revive it in America among those who have never been denied the right to vote.
— Desmond Tutu
Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.
— JM Coetzee
The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone. 'This place being what?' 'This place being South Africa
— JM Coetzee
Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa.
— JM Coetzee
Oh, 1994, April 27. There won't be a day like that ever again. I mean, the sky was blue, with a blueness that had never been there before.
— Desmond Tutu
In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.
— Desmond Tutu
A great white jumped into my cage when I was diving in South Africa. Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me.
— Leonardo DiCaprio
At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.
— Nelson Mandela
As a child, Andrew Murray's "world" spanned two continents, Africa and Europe; but ultimately his preaching, teaching, and writing fueled spiritual awakening and revival with a worldwide impact. Andrew Murray was born in 1828 in South Africa, into a Dutch Reformed parsonage. At age ten he and a brother sailed to Scotland for schooling and later to Holland for theological studies, before returning ten years later to South Africa for pastoral ministries of their own.
— Andrew Murray
It's a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.
— Desmond Tutu