Quotes By Nelson Mandela

I did not have an unlimited library to choose from on Robben Island. We had access to many unremembered mysteries and detective novels and all the works of Daphne du Maurier, but little more.

To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy.

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.

A new world will be won not by those who stand at a distance with their arms folded, but by those who are in the arena, whose garments are torn by storms and whose bodies are maimed in the course of the contest.

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.

Although few people will remember 3 June 1993, it was a landmark in South African history. On that day, after months of negotiations at the World Trade Centre, the multiparty forum voted to set a date for the country's first national, nonracial, one-person-one-vote election: 27 April 1994. For the first time in South African history, the black majority would go to the polls to elect their own leaders.

If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent.

Crime must be brought under control... Freedom without civility, freedom without the ability to live in peace, was not true freedom at all.

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not.

His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life.

In South Africa, to be poor and black was normal, to be poor and white was a tragedy.

When the women begin to take an active part in the struggle, no power on earth can stop us from achieving freedom in our lifetime.

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.

We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success.

The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system.

There are victories whose glory lies only in the fact that they are known to those who win them.

It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

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.

The grave plight of the people compels them to resist to the death the stinking policies of the gangsters that rule our country.