“There is a universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings irrespective of their social status.”
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Nelson Mandela
“The human body has an enormous capacity for adjusting to trying circumstances. I have found that one can bear the unbearable if one can keep one's spirit strong, even when one's body is being tested. Strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation. Your spirit can be full even when your stomach is empty.”
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Nelson Mandela
“after years of imprisonment, physical and emotional abuse, and separation from his family, Mandela said, “I realized that they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. They could not take those things. Those things I still had control over. And I decided not to give them away.” So Mandela’s story is really the story of those two things he never gave away: his brilliant mind, and his great heart.”
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Nelson Mandela
“In that moment, something stirred deep inside all of us, something strong and intimate, that bound us to one another. In that moment we felt the hand of the great past that made us what we were and the power of the great cause that linked us all together.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.”
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Nelson Mandela
“It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.”
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Nelson Mandela
“The purpose of freedom is to create it for others. Prison desk calendar, written on Robben Island, June 2, 1979”
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Nelson Mandela
“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.”
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Nelson Mandela
“As I have said, the first thing is to be honest with yourself. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself... Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, but humility.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I was a young man who attempted to make up for his ignorance with militancy.”
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Nelson Mandela
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Banning not only confines one physically, it imprisons one's spirit. it induces a kind of psychological claustrophobia that makes one yearn not only for freedom of movement but spiritual escape...This insidious effect of bans was that at a certain point one began to think that the opponent was not without but within.”
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Nelson Mandela
“No era la falta de oportunidades lo que limitaba a mi pueblo, sino la falta de oportunidades.”
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Nelson Mandela
“It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.”
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Nelson Mandela
“It is not my ambition to marry a white woman or swim in a white pool. It is political equality that we want.”
―
Nelson Mandela
