Desmond Tutu Quotes

68 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
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
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
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
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

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

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
How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

Desmond Tutu