Desmond Tutu Quotes

We spend billions on banks when we know that a fraction of this money could save all the children in the world.

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.

If you recall the happiest moments in your life, they are all from when you were doing something for somebody else.

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.

To forgive is to abandon your right to pay back the predator in his own coin, but it is the loss that Liberates.

We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.

It makes no sense to invest in [fossil fuel] companies that undermine our future

Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin.

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity - or because of their sexual orientation.

The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

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.

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.

We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. For there will be no tomorrow.

I can't control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it.

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.

Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart.

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.

Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth

Forgiveness is taking seriously the awfulness of what has happened when you are treated unfairly. Forgiveness is not pretending that things are other than the way they are.

Arrogance really comes from insecurity, and in the end our feeling that we are bigger than others is really the flip side of our feeling that we are smaller than others.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

Gaza is going to test who believes in the worth of human beings.

Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

We are made for loving. If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water.

We need other human beings in order to be human.

We must stop climate change. And we can, if we use the tactics that worked in South Africa against the worst carbon emitters.

When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

That's the chief lesson I have learned: the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail.

When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.

Love your enemy; it will ruin his reputation.

God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.

It is by standing up for the rights of girls and women that we truly measure up as men.

As long as we fail to face up to the past and deal with it accordingly, the future will smack of corruption.

I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven.

The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.

Fundamental rights belong to the human being just because you are a human being.

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

Goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than darkness. Life is stronger than death. Victory is ours through Him who loved us.

No one is self-sufficient. And it's not a one-way thing- -the generosity of spirit from one side provokes a response in kind from the other side.

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew.

Men and boys, we show our manhood through the way we treat our women. Our wives, our sisters, our mothers.

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

For Christians, who believe they are created in the image of God, it is the Godhead, diversity in unity and the three-in-oneness of God, which we and all creation reflect.

No peace is impossible when people are determined to achieve it

If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.

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.

Without forgiveness, there is no future.

Our Lord wanted us to be Christ-like. Christ-like doesn't mean not having faults. It means that you do actually have a capacity to draw out the good that is in others.