Nelson Mandela Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

The challenge for every prisoner, particularly every political prisoner, is how to survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished.

Nelson Mandela
A bright future beckons. The onus is on us, through hard work, honesty and integrity, to reach for the stars.

Nelson Mandela
We now undertake that we cannot rest while millions of our people suffer the pain and indignity of poverty in all its forms.

Nelson Mandela
In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people.

Nelson Mandela
When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.

Nelson Mandela
The anchor of all my dreams is the collective wisdom of mankind as a whole.

Nelson Mandela
Who could doubt that sport is a crucial window for the propagation of fair play and justice? After all, fair play is a value that is essential to sport.

Nelson Mandela
I enjoyed the discipline and solitariness of long-distance running, which allowed me to escape from the hurly-burly of school life.

Nelson Mandela
There can be no greater gift than that of giving one's time and energy to help others without expecting anything in return.

Nelson Mandela
Politics can be strengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics.

Nelson Mandela
We must work together to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunity and power in our society.

Nelson Mandela
AIDS today in Africa is claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famines and floods and the ravages of such deadly diseases as malaria... We must act now for the sake of the world.

Nelson Mandela
I am convinced that floods of personal disaster can never drown a determined revolutionary nor can the cumulus of misery that accompanies tragedy suffocate him.

Nelson Mandela
We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.

Nelson Mandela
Learn to know yourself... to search realistically and regularly the processes of your own mind and feelings.

Nelson Mandela
In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.

Nelson Mandela
I have always endeavoured to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion.

Nelson Mandela
To go to prison because of your convictions and be prepared to suffer for what you believe in, is something worthwhile. It is an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences.

Nelson Mandela
Between the anvil of united mass action and the hammer of the armed struggle we shall crush apartheid and white minority racist rule.

Nelson Mandela
I am influenced more than ever before by the conviction that social equality is the only basis of human happiness.

Nelson Mandela
If you don't intend having a compromise, you don't negotiate at all.

Nelson Mandela
A society that does not value its older people denies its roots and endangers its future. Let us strive to enhance their capacity to support themselves for as long as possible and, when they cannot do so anymore, to care for them.

Nelson Mandela
The doctors and nurses treated me in a natural way as though they had been dealing with blacks on a basis of equality all their lives. It reaffirmed my long-held belief that education was the enemy of prejudice. These were men and women of science, and science had no room for racism.

Nelson Mandela
Even behind prison walls I can see the heavy clouds and the blue sky over the horizon

Nelson Mandela
To the youth of today, I also have a wish to make: be the scriptwriters of your destiny and feature yourselves as stars that showed the way towards a brighter future.

Nelson Mandela
Political division, based on color, is entirely artificial; and when it disappears, so will the domination of one color group by another.

Nelson Mandela
Government violence can do only one thing and that is to breed counter-violence.

Nelson Mandela
We have waited too long for our freedom. We can no longer wait.

Nelson Mandela
We have laid the foundation for a better life. Things that were unimaginable a few years ago have become everyday reality. I belong to the generation of leaders for whom the achievement of democracy was the defining challenge.

Nelson Mandela
It is so easy to break down and destroy.
The heroes are those who make peace and
build.

Nelson Mandela