“ 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"
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Nelson Mandela
“Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do.”
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Nelson Mandela
“He knew when to compromise. Yet he never compromised his principles. He was a militant. Yet a militant who knew how to plan, assess concrete situations and emerge with rational solutions to problems.”
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Nelson Mandela
“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.”
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Nelson Mandela
“You will achieve more in this world through acts of mercy than you will through acts of retribution.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination,” he told the court. “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
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Nelson Mandela
“life has a way of forcing decisions on those who vacillate.”
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Nelson Mandela
“before either of us knew it, we were in the same room and in each other’s arms. I kissed and held my wife for the first time in all these many years. It was a moment I had dreamed about a thousand times. It was as if I were still dreaming. I held her to me for what seemed like an eternity. We were still and silent except for the sound of our hearts. I did not want to let go of her at all, but I broke free and embraced my daughter and then took her child into my lap. It had been twenty-one years since I had even touched my wife’s hand.”
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Nelson Mandela
I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur (...) I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there was mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
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Nelson Mandela
“No era la falta de oportunidades lo que limitaba a mi pueblo, sino la falta de oportunidades.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Out of the motorcar (I learned later that this majestic vehicle was a Ford V8) stepped a short, thickset man wearing a smart suit.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Ma il silenzio amoroso tra una madre e un figlio non è una dimensione solitaria.”
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Nelson Mandela
“She married a man who soon left her; that man became a myth; and then that myth returned home and proved to be just a man after all.”
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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?”
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Nelson Mandela
“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.”
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Nelson Mandela
