“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. -Nelson Mandela, activist, South African president, Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1918)”
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Nelson Mandela
“He did not need to be ordained, for the traditional religion of the Xhosas is characterized by a cosmic wholeness, so that there is little distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the natural and the supernatural.”
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Nelson Mandela
“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.”
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Nelson Mandela
“It is music and dancing that make me at peace with the world.”
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Nelson Mandela
“In another conversation I said, ‘Tell me the truth. When you were leaving prison after twenty-seven years and walking down that road to freedom, didn’t you hate them all over again?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely I did, because they’d imprisoned me for so long. I was abused. I didn’t get to see my children grow up. I lost my marriage and the best years of my life. I was angry. And I was afraid, because I had not been free in so long. But as I got closer to the car that would take me away, I realized that when I went through that gate, if I still hated them, they would still have me. I wanted to be free. And so I let it go.”
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Nelson Mandela
“A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.At a point, one can only fight fire with fire”
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Nelson Mandela
“A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.”
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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
“Only mass education, he used to say, would free my people, arguing that an educated man could not be oppressed because he could think for himself.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world”
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Nelson Mandela
“Crime must be brought under control... Freedom without civility, freedom without the ability to live in peace, was not true freedom at all.”
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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
“Violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid.”
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Nelson Mandela
