"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."
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Quote collection
Desmond Tutu quotes (page 14 of 27)
521 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The world is awful but also the world is beautiful. Human beings are awful, but ultimately human beings are tremendous."
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"It was spine tingling, actually, when you saw how people kept saying, "Release Nelson Mandela," and meaning really, "Release all of our political prisoners.""
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"We pray that Aung San Suu Kyi and her country are now on a path to freedom"
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"God wants to set the oppressed free from being oppressed and the oppressors free from oppressing."
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"Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite."
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"You have to say, whatever it is that I say or do or think or teach must be something that will be consistent with who Jesus Christ was. So that is your ultimate litmus test, not that you've got specific words to say, whatever they may be saying. It is what is being said. They're consistent with the revelation of God that we encounter in Jesus."
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"God is on the side of the oppressed."
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"Consider what we sometimes do with our children: We imbue them with this sense, very early on, that they have got to succeed. We are not content that they just do well, they have got to wipe the floor with the opposition."
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"You might have thought that a world such as ours, so hard-nosed and cynical and brash, would have very little time for transcendence, spiritual values of goodness and compassion, gentleness, and caring, but we actually do experience them."
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"God could have created us to be automatons who were always choosing the right side, making the right decision. It is an incredible thing, God said "I want persons" who therefore have freedom."
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"People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation."
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"The acknowledgement that this person is English, white, or French, or German, this is Portuguese, this is Rwandan, this is Senegalese, this is a black South Africans is a glorious thing. To speak of those positively, to say that they have characteristics, each one of them, that the others almost always do not have, and that there is a complementarily about it."
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"The devastation wreaked by landmines is not only horrendous but immoral"
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"I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually."
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"People united in pursuit of a righteous cause are unstoppable"
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"It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ."
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"We who advocate peace are becoming an irrelevance when we speak peace. The government speaks rubber bullets, live bullets, tear gas, police dogs, detention, and death."
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"The future of our fragile, beautiful planet home is in our hands. As God's family, we are stewards of God's creation. We can be wantonly irresponsible, or we can be caring and compassionate. God says, "I have set before you life and death... Choose life.""
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"There are different kinds of justice. Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative - not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew."
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