“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Men have different capacities and react differently to stress. But the stronger ones raised up the weaker ones, and both became stronger in the process.”
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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
“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Don't Judge a person by his success stories, but only with how many times the person stood up, after falling down.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Africans were desperate for legal help in government buildings: it was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be on the streets after 11 p.m., a crime not to have a pass book and a crime to have the wrong signature in that book, a crime to be unemployed and a crime to be employed in the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and a crime to have no place to live.”
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Nelson Mandela
“But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.”
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Nelson Mandela
“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”
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Nelson Mandela
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion … if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”
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Nelson Mandela
“On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture. Africans of my generation—and even today—generally have both an English and an African name. Whites were either unable or unwilling to pronounce an African name, and considered it uncivilized to have one. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess.”
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Nelson Mandela
“He did not need to be ordained, for the traditional religion of the Xhosas is characterized by a cosmic wholeness, so that there is little distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the natural and the supernatural.”
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Nelson Mandela
