Desmond Tutu Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

Do your little bit of good where you are; its those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

Desmond Tutu
You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.

Desmond Tutu
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

Desmond Tutu
When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said: 'Let us pray'. We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Desmond Tutu
Without forgiveness there can be no future for a relationship between individuals or within and between nations.

Desmond Tutu
When we look squarely at injustice and get involved, we actually feel less pain, not more, because we overcome the gnawing guilt and despair that festers under our numbness. We clean the wound - our own and others' - and it can finally heal.

Desmond Tutu
Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.

Desmond Tutu
It is for real that injustice and oppression will not have the last word. There was a time when Hitler looked like he was going to vanquish all of Europe, and where is he now?

Desmond Tutu
I'm coming to believe more and more in the truth that everything we do has consequences. A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear.

Desmond Tutu
Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

Desmond Tutu
People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful — very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Desmond Tutu
When two persons are engaged in conflict and one of them is considerably stronger than the other, to be neutral is not just and fair and impartisan, because to be neutral is in fact to side with the powerful.

Desmond Tutu
He has a childlike, boyish, impish, mischievousness. And I have to try and make him behave properly, like a holy man!

Desmond Tutu
Life is more than breath and a heartbeat; meaning and purpose are the life of life.

Desmond Tutu
My father used to say: 'Don't raise your voice, improve your argument'.

Desmond Tutu
What an awful blot on our copy book. Do we really care about human rights, do we care that people of flesh and blood, fellow Africans, are being treated like rubbish, almost worse than they were ever treated by rabid racists?

Desmond Tutu
God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

Desmond Tutu
All of us experience fear, but when we confront and acknowledge it, we are able to turn it into courage. Being courageous does not mean never being scared; it means acting as you know you must even though you are undeniably afraid.

Desmond Tutu
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

Desmond Tutu
If we have loved well while we were alive, there is life after death here-our love will go on for generations.

Desmond Tutu
We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.

Desmond Tutu
Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, his will for us will prevail, love will prevail over hate, justice over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness.

Desmond Tutu
I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this. I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place. I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.

Desmond Tutu
We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

Desmond Tutu
Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional.

Desmond Tutu