“A friend of mine once saw Mandela in a South African airport and told me this story. The president had noticed a lady who was walking by with her daughter, a beautiful five- or six-year-old girl, with blond hair and blue eyes. Mandela walked up to this little girl and leaned down and shook her hand, and he said, “Do you know who I am?” And the child smiled and said, “Yes, you are President Mandela.” Mandela said, “Yes, I am your president. And if you work very hard in school and you learn a lot and you are nice to everybody, you too could grow up to be President of South Africa.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Men, I think, are not capable of doing nothing, of saying nothing, of not reacting to injustice, of not protesting against oppression, of not striving for the good of society and the good life in the ways they see it.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?”
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Nelson Mandela
“The brave man is not the one who has no fears, he is the one who triumphs over his fears.”
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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.”
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Nelson Mandela
“O mais importante da vida é a marca que deixamos na vida dos outros.”
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Nelson Mandela
“No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.”
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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
“Only free men can negotiate,prisoners can't enter in contracts”
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Nelson Mandela
“There are few misfortunes in this world that you cannot turn into a personal trimuph if you have the iron will and the neccessary skill.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.”
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Nelson Mandela
“But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.”
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Nelson Mandela
“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
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Nelson Mandela
“On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture. Africans of my generation—and even today—generally have both an English and an African name. Whites were either unable or unwilling to pronounce an African name, and considered it uncivilized to have one. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess.”
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Nelson Mandela
