“One subject we hearkened back to again and again was the question of whether there were tigers in Africa.”
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Nelson Mandela
“It is most unusual to return to a place that has changed in ways you yourself have altered.”
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Nelson Mandela
“overcoming fear, personal scarifies for the cause of freedom of all, and ability to see good in your enemies – No one is born hating another person because of the color of your 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
“There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Know your enemy — and learn about his favorite sport.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world”
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Nelson Mandela
“Having resentment against someone is like drinking poison and thinking it will kill your enemy.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.”
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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
“In my country we go to prison first and then become President. ”
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Nelson Mandela
“May your choices reflect your hopes and not your fears.”
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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
“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.”
―
Nelson Mandela
