Quotes By Nelson Mandela

The curious beauty of African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad tale. You may be poor, you may have only a ramshackle house, you may have lost your job, but that song gives you hope.

In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people.

Without education, your children can never really meet the challenges they will face. So it's very important to give children education and explain that they should play a role for their country.

MY greatest regret in life is that I never became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

You must not compromise your principles, but you must not humiliate the opposition.

Who could doubt that sport is a crucial window for the propagation of fair play and justice? After all, fair play is a value that is essential to sport.

We must nurture tolerance, collective wisdom, and democracy.

The history of struggle is rich with stories of heroes and heroines - some of them leaders, some of them followers, all of them deserve to be remembered.

If you are negotiating you must do so in a spirit of reconciliation, not from the point of view of issuing ultimatums.

The power of imagination created the illusion that my vision went much farther than the naked eye could actually see.

A government which uses force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it.

No problem is so deep that it cannot be overcome, given the will of all parties, through discussion and negotiation rather than force and violence.

Only armchair politicians are immune from committing mistakes. Errors are inherent in political action.

It is a grave error for any leader to be oversensitive in the face of criticism.

Sport has the power to inspire and unite people. In Africa, soccer enjoys great popularity and has a particular place in the hearts of people.

Let us join hands and build a truly South African nation.

A garden was one of the few thing in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.

To the youth of today, I also have a wish to make: be the scriptwriters of your destiny and feature yourselves as stars that showed the way towards a brighter future.

Where people of goodwill get together and transcend their differences for the common good, peaceful and just solutions can be found even for those problems which seem most intractable.

I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.