Best Desmond Tutu Quotes

Desmond Tutu Quotes About Hope, Peace, Forgiveness, Death, Education, Oppression & Love! The Nobel Peace Prize winner, a prominent South African Anglican bishop, Desmond Tutu, was recognized for his ardent resistance to apartheid policy. On October 7, 1931, Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, South Africa.

When Tutu was growing up in South Africa, the country was strictly divided, with Black Africans denied the ability to vote and restricted to specific regions. Even though Tutu had been admitted to medical school after graduating high school in 1950, his family couldn’t afford the hefty cost of attendance. When he received a scholarship to attend Pretoria Bantu Normal College, he graduated in 1953 with a qualification in teaching.

During the apartheid era, Tutu was angrier about the pervasive racism in South African society. As Johannesburg’s first black Anglican dean in 1975, Tutu was thrust into the limelight as an international figure. With so many of the movement’s key leaders either imprisoned or exiled, his prominence and eloquence as a leading voice of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa were highly significant. Tutu became South Africa’s first black bishop and the highest-ranking Anglican in his country.

It was primarily because of Tutu’s vigorous advocacy and courageous leadership that apartheid in South Africa was ended in 1993, and the country’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela. After retiring from the national office in the late 1990s, Tutu talks about problems including TB treatment, HIV/AIDS protection, global warming, and the terminally sick’s right to die with dignity. On December 26, 2021, he will pass away. Tutu was a leading human rights advocate across the globe.

Best Desmond Tutu Quotes

1. “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” – Desmond Tutu

2. “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” – Desmond Tutu

3. “Without forgiveness, there is no future.” – Desmond Tutu

4. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” – Desmond Tutu

5. “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” – Desmond Tutu

6. “Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.” – Desmond Tutu

7. “My father used to say, don’t raise your voice; improve your argument.” – Desmond Tutu

8. “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human.” – Desmond Tutu

9. “You don’t choose your family, they are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” – Desmond Tutu

10. “I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.” – Desmond Tutu

11. “Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.” – Desmond Tutu

12. “Freedom and liberty lose out by default because good people are not vigilant.” – Desmond Tutu

13. “A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.” – Desmond Tutu

14. “We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.” – Desmond Tutu

15. “Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.” – Desmond Tutu

16. “Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.” – Desmond Tutu

17. “I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.” – Desmond Tutu

18. “We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.” – Desmond Tutu

19. “I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.” – Desmond Tutu

20. “Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.” – Desmond Tutu

21. “Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.” – Desmond Tutu

22. “When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.” – Desmond Tutu

23. “As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.” – Desmond Tutu

24. “The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.” – Desmond Tutu

25. “When a pile of cups is tottering on the edge of the table and you warn that they will crash to the ground, in South Africa you are blamed when that happens.” – Desmond Tutu

26. “I certainly know that I would not be able to survive if it were not for the fact that I am being upheld by the prayers of so many people.” – Desmond Tutu

27. “You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.” – Desmond Tutu

28. “Universal education is not only a moral imperative but an economic necessity, to pave the way toward making many more nations self-sufficient and self-sustaining.” – Desmond Tutu

29. “Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.” – Desmond Tutu

30. “We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!” – Desmond Tutu