“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
“I stand here before you not as a prophet, but as a humble servant of you, the people.”
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Nelson Mandela
“For a revolution is not just a question of pulling a trigger; its purpose is to create a fair just society”
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Nelson Mandela
“ 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
“May your choices reflect your hopes and not your fears.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid.”
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Nelson Mandela
“I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.”
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Nelson Mandela
“LIFE IN ALEXANDRA was exhilarating and precarious. Its atmosphere was alive, its spirit adventurous, its people resourceful. Although the township did boast some handsome buildings, it could fairly be described as a slum, living testimony to the neglect of the authorities. The roads were unpaved and dirty, and filled with hungry, undernourished children scampering around half-naked. The air was thick with the smoke from coal fires in tin braziers and stoves. A single water tap served several houses. Pools of stinking, stagnant water full of maggots collected by the side of the road. Alexandra was known as “Dark City” for its complete absence of electricity. Walking home at night was perilous, for there were no lights, the silence pierced by yells, laughter, and occasional gunfire. So different from the darkness of the Transkei, which seemed to envelop one in a welcome embrace.”
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Nelson Mandela
“If I had my time over I would do the same again, so would any man who dares call himself a man.”
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Nelson Mandela
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.”
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Nelson Mandela
“One day, I was on the front lawn of the property and aimed the gun at a sparrow perched high in a tree. Hazel Goldreich, Arthur's wife, was watching me and jokingly remarked that I would never hit the target. But she had hardly finished the sentence when the sparrow fell to the ground. I turned to her and was about to boast, when the Goldreichs' son Paul, then about five years old, turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, "David, why did you kill that bird? Its mother will be sad." My mood immediately shifted from one of pride to shame; I felt that this small boy had far more humanity than I did. It was an odd sensation for a man who was the leader of a nascent guerrilla army.”
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Nelson Mandela
“Losing a sense of time is an easy way to lose one’s grip and even one’s sanity.”
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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
“I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”
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Nelson Mandela
