Quotes About Freedom

and when we did come out [of prison], my children said, "We thought we had a father and one day he'd come back. But to our dismay, our father came back and he left us alone because he has now become the father of the nation.

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

A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones - and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.

Let freedom reign.

Un luchador por la libertad aprende, por el camino más duro, que es el opresor el que define la naturaleza de la lucha.

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

What struck me so forcefully was how small the planet had become during my decades in prison;

In confidence we lay our cause before the whole world. Whether we win or whether we die, freedom will rise in Africa like the sun from the morning clouds.

I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Recordé a todos, una y otra vez, que la lucha por la liberación no había sido una batalla contra otros grupos u otros colores de piel, sino contra un sistema represivo.

Banning not only confines one physically, it imprisons one's spirit. it induces a kind of psychological claustrophobia that makes one yearn not only for freedom of movement but spiritual escape...This insidious effect of bans was that at a certain point one began to think that the opponent was not without but within.

This was one of the state's most barbarous techniques of applying pressure: imprisoning the wives and children of freedom fighters. Many men in prison were able to handle anything the authorities did to them, but the thought of the state doing the same thing to their families was almost impossible to bear.

we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity.

The struggle is my life.

Een mens die een ander mens van zijn vrijheid berooft, is een gevangene van de haat, opgesloten achter de tralies van vooroordelen en kleingeestigheid.

This would be a hazardous life, and I would be apart from my family, but when a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

It is not my ambition to marry a white woman or swim in a white pool. It is political equality that we want.

Bojovník za svobodu bolestn? zjiš?uje, že zp?sob boje ur?uje utla?ovatel a že utla?ovanému ?asto nezbývá než se uchýlit k týmž metodám, jaké používá utla?ovatel. V ur?ité chvíli zkrátka musíte nep?íteli oplatit stejnou mincí.

Freedom cannot be achieved unless the women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.

As I finally walked through those gates to enter a car on the other side, I felt - even at the age of seventy-one - that my life was beginning anew. My ten thousand days of imprisonment were over.

Although it was not published while I was in prison, it forms the spine of this memoir.

They reminded us that the freedom struggle was not merely a question of making speeches, holding meetings, passing resolutions, and sending deputations, but of meticulous organization, militant action, and, above all, the willingness to suffer and sacrifice.

A pesar de todo, yo no tenía la menor duda de que volvería a ser un hombre libre algún día.