Desmond Tutu

Desmond Tutu (1931-2021), full name Desmond Mpilo Tutu, was a South African anti-apartheid activist and religious leader was a schoolmaster in his early days. He joined Church as Anglican priest in 1960 and rose to archbishop of Capetown in 1986. He advocated non-violence and received Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

Wisdom & Quotes

• A person is a person because he recognises others as persons.
• My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
• One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don't have a history, that they have no roots.
• I am not interested in picking up the crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
• I am leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
• A university must have a social conscience.
• When a chap is in love, he will go out in all kinds of weather to keep an appointment with his beloved. Love can be demanding, in fact more demanding than law. It has its own imperatives - think of a mother sitting by the bedside of a sick child through the night, impelled only by love. Nothing is too much trouble for love.
• Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility.
• We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black and white.
• My flock is black, my block is white. One has got to say to our people,"I love you. I care for you, enormously." And when I care about black liberation, it is because I care about white liberation.
• For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognise that we are humans, too.
• We don't want apartheid liberalised. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.

Cemal Sureya