Quotes from Desmond Tutu

Nuestra bondad crece cuando se le pone a prueba

Until women are deeply involved in opposing the violence in the world, we are not going to bring it to an end. All women must be equally at the forefront of the movements for social justice. And

When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All

we choose to either walk the path of revenge and be bound to suffering, or take the path of forgiveness and be freed into healing.

After all, we are created in the image of a God who is a diversity of persons who exist in ineffable unity. This

When we accept our own pain we can begin to see past it to the other person's woundedness. We can begin to consider that if we were in their shoes, if we stood inside their story, we might have done to others what they did to us.

When we can accept both our humanity and the perpetrator's we can write a new story. One in which we are no longer cast as a victim, but a survivor, even perhaps a hero.

How do you convey that sense of freedom that tasted like sweet nectar for the first time? How do you explain it to someone who was born into freedom? It is impossible to convey. It is ineffable, like trying perhaps to describe the color red to a person born blind. It is a feeling that makes you want to cry and laugh at the same time, to dance with joy, and yet fearful that it was too good to be true and that it just might all evaporate.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness."-Desmond Tutu Quote Read: 5/8/18

Don't raise your voice- improve your argument.

The process we embarked on through the TRC was, as all real growth proves to be, astoundingly painful and profoundly beautiful.

What a profound scientific discovery that blacks, Coloreds (usually people of mixed race), and Indians were in fact human beings, who had the same concerns and anxieties and aspirations. They wanted a decent home, a good job, a safe environment for their families, good schools for their children, and almost none wanted to drive the whites into the sea. They just wanted their place in the sun. Everywhere else elections are

The black person entered the booth one person and emerged on the other side a new, transfigured person.

The white person entered the voting booth burdened by the load of guilt for having enjoyed the fruits of oppression and injustice. He emerged as somebody new. He too cried out, "The burden has been lifted from my shoulders, I am free, transfigured, made into a new person." He walked tall, with head held high and shoulders set square and straight. White people found that freedom

So too I would say we South Africans will survive and prevail only together, black and white bound together by circumstance and history as we strive to claw our way out of the morass that was apartheid racism. Up and out together, black and white together. Neither group on its own could or would make it. God had bound us, manacled us, together. In a way it was to live out what Martin Luther King, Jr., had said, "Unless we learn to live together as brothers [and sisters]

Forgiveness is truly the grace by which we enable another person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew.

He made a powerful distinction between healing and curing: Curing involves the resolution of the illness but was not always possible. Healing, he said, was coming to wholeness and could happen whether or not the illness was curable.

The rubric of proportionality had to be observed—that the means were proportional to the objective.

He invited his white jailer to attend his inauguration as an honored guest, the first of many gestures he would make in his spectacular way, showing his breathtaking magnanimity and willingness to forgive. He would be a potent agent for the reconciliation he

To be impartial... is indeed to have taken sides already... with the status quo.

he would urge his compatriots to work for and which would form part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he was going to appoint to deal with our country's past. This man, who had been vilified and

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act despite it.

Just as this scale predicted the future health and happiness of the children in this study, so does knowing and telling our own stories of harm predict our future health and happiness in recovering from that trauma. When we know our stories and make sense of what has happened, we get connected to the larger story of our lives and its meaning. We become more resilient, we are able to handle stress, and we heal.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.