Nelson Mandela Quotes

261 Sourced Quotes

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

Nelson Mandela
Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.

Nelson Mandela
I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.

Nelson Mandela
This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees.

Nelson Mandela
In all disputes a point is arrived at where no party, no matter how right or wrong it might have been at the start of that dispute, will any longer be totally in the right or totally in the wrong. Such a point, I believe, has been reached in this debate. Let us not equivocate: a tragedy of unprecedented proportions is unfolding in Africa.

Nelson Mandela
One of the sad realities today is that very few people, especially young people, read books. Unless we can find imaginative ways of addressing this reality, future generations are in danger of losing their history.

Nelson Mandela
It is a grave error for any leader to be oversensitive in the face of criticism

Nelson Mandela
Let us give publicity to H.I.V/AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V And people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary for which people go to hell and not to heaven.

Nelson Mandela
We slaughter one another in our words and attitudes. We slaughter one another in the stereotypes and mistrust that linger in our heads, and the words of hate we spew from our lips.

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

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