Quotes from Haile Selassie

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

Until all Africans stand and speak as free human beings, equal in the eyes of the Almighty; until that day, the African continent shall not know peace.

Peace is a day-to-day problem, the product of a multitude of events and judgments. Peace is not an 'is,' it is a 'becoming.'

Knowledge is power. If it is not applied properly to create, let there be no doubts, it will destroy.

There is no power or authority without responsibility, and he who accepts the one cannot escape or evade the other.

Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.

A good leader... maintains a balance between emotional drive and sound thinking.

As is commonly said, 'to start anything is simple; to develop it and bring it to a successful culmination takes great effort.'

We must act to shape and mold the future, and leave our imprint on events as they slip past into history.

If a strong government finds that it can, with impunity, destroy a weak people, then the hour has struck for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment.

Africa's mineral wealth is great; we should co-operate in its development.

Leadership does not mean domination. The world is always well supplied with people who wish to rule and dominate others.

Leadership does not mean domination.

Any who may wish to profit himself alone from the knowledge given him, rather than serve others through the knowledge he has gained from learning, is betraying knowledge and rendering it worthless

There is no safer anchorage for our learning, our lives, and our public actions than that provided by Divine teachings.

If you are open-minded and ready to learn, there are many things which you can learn not only from books and instructors but from the very life experience itself.

Everyone, in all walks of life, regardless of his professional occupation should feel concerned and play an active role to solve such problems which affect mankind.

There is nothing as precious to man as a sound mind in a sound body and it is essential that the physical well being of our people merits as much attention as its spiritual welfare

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked.

We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.

We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.

The commentators of 1963 speak, in discussing Africa, of the Monrovia States, the Brazzaville Group, the Casablanca Powers, of these and many more. Let us put an end to these terms. What we require is a single African organisation through which Africa's single voice may be heard, within which Africa's problems may be studied and resolved.

Knowledge paves the way to Love, and Love in its turn fosters understanding, and leads one along the path of great common achievements.