“Lead from the back and let others believe they are in front.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“If I preached unity, I must act like a unifier, even at the risk of perhaps alienating some of my own colleagues.”
―
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”
―
Nelson Mandela
“People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“I do not deny, however, that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the Whites.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“Tread softly,
Breathe peacefully,
Laugh hysterically.”
― Nelson Mandela”
―
Nelson Mandela
“One cannot be prepared for something while secretly believing it will not happen.”
―
Nelson Mandela
As a leader, one must sometimes take actions that are unpopular, or whose results will not be known for years to come.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his kin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than the opposite.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“The arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black from Coloured or Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of the same family were classified differently, all depending on whether one child had a lighter or darker complexion. Where one was allowed to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of one’s hair or the size of one’s lips.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“One subject we hearkened back to again and again was the question of whether there were tigers in Africa.”
―
Nelson Mandela
