“ When you are young and strong...you can stay alive on your hatred"....but realized later "They can take everything from me except my mind and heart"
―
Nelson Mandela
“the wealthiest and most popular boy at the circumcision school.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Having resentment against someone is like drinking poison and thinking it will kill your enemy.”
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Nelson Mandela
“One of the things I learned when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself, I could not change others.”
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Nelson Mandela
“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“Violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I wondered--not for the first time--whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one's own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one's aging mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one's responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?”
―
Nelson Mandela
“It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not...His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life...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. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“Politics can be strengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics.”
―
Nelson Mandela
“In my country we go to prison first and then become President. ”
―
Nelson Mandela
“It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.”
―
Nelson Mandela
