Quotes from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn't any pain I haven't known.

We shall liberate our country.

The years of imprisonment hardened me... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn't be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life... there is no longer anything I can fear.

It would be a most despicable thing to suggest I would exploit the poor for my own personal gain.

You build dreams, you build castles in the air, and you hope that at least part of that will be realized, even under apartheid.

I don't say we should have performed miracles, but surely there ought to have been a difference between the apartheid regime and governance of the ANC after 17 years.

We cannot pretend we do not have problems; we cannot pretend things are not wrong in our country. A lot of things are wrong.

The government can become so elitist and concentrate on elitist interests. To help the government, you must constantly hold its attention.

I am a living symbol of the white man's fear. I never realized how deeply embedded this fear is until I came to Brandfort.

Those 18 months in solitary confinement... bruised my soul. If I had had a weapon, I would have fought my way out.

I wanted to be a doctor at some point, and I was always bringing home strays from school: people who were too poor to pay fees or have food. My parents never rebuked me or told me that they were hard-pressed, too.

My continent knows more about me than I do myself.

I often wonder why I attract so much criticism.

I don't want a grand villa in a rich suburb alongside white people where many of my former comrades choose to live. I would never betray my roots in that way.

Mandela did go to prison, and he went in there as a burning revolutionary. But look what came out. Mandela let us down.

I never talk about my private life.

I believe in myself and the justice I've fought for all my life.

Nelson was locked up on Robben Island, and wives like me had been warned we would bring our husbands home as corpses from that place. But I always believed he would be released. It was my duty to have a home ready for us.

We have a shared destiny, a shared responsibility to save the world from those who attempt to destroy it.

I'm like thousands of women in South Africa who lost their men to cities and prisons... I stand defiant, tall and strong.

The brutality of apartheid drains you of that emotion of fear if you have gone through everything you can be put through in the process of harassment.

It dawned on me then that you either had to survive apartheid, or you had to perish with it. And I decided to survive.

As much as the South African racist regime is prepared to fight to the last man, so are we determined to fight to the bitter end.

I have a good relationship with Mandela. But I am not Mandela's product. I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy.