Desmond Tutu

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that's where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it - oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.

Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you've closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.

Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC's military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.

Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Without forgiveness, there's no future.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

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

Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.

God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.

The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.

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

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.