Quotes from Desmond Tutu

Sometimes we confuse humility with timidity...humility allows us to celebrate the gifts of others but it does not mean you have to deny your own gifts or shrink from using them.

It is important to tell your story. It is equally important not to get trapped in your story. It is not what happened to us that matters but how what happened hurt us.

The Archbishop was pointing his index fingers at his head. "You learn when something happens that tests you." And then he was pretending to be speaking as God might. "'Hello, you said you wanted to be more compassionate.' 'Hello, you wanted to be a little more laid-back.

I remembered seeing the lines of people who had waited for hours and hours to vote in the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The lines snaked on for miles. I remember wondering at the time, as U.S. voter turnout was hovering under forty percent, how long that sense of joy and appreciation for the right to vote would last and whether there was any way to revive it in America among those who have never been denied the right to vote.

Ultimately, forgiveness is a choice we make, and the ability to forgive others comes from the recognition that we are all flawed and all human. We all have made mistakes and harmed others. We will again. We find it easier to practice forgiveness when we can recognize that the roles could have been reversed.

Until women are deeply involved in opposing the violence in the world, we are not going to bring it to an end. All women must be equally at the forefront of the movements for social justice.

We choose to either walk the path of revenge and be bound to suffering, or take the path of forgiveness and be freed into healing.

After all, we are created in the image of a God who is a diversity of persons who exist in ineffable unity.

When we accept our own pain we can begin to see past it to the other person's woundedness. We can begin to consider that if we were in their shoes, if we stood inside their story, we might have done to others what they did to us.

When we can accept both our humanity and the perpetrator's we can write a new story. One in which we are no longer cast as a victim, but a survivor, even perhaps a hero.

The process we embarked on through the TRC was, as all real growth proves to be, astoundingly painful and profoundly beautiful.

What a profound scientific discovery that blacks, Coloreds (usually people of mixed race), and Indians were in fact human beings, who had the same concerns and anxieties and aspirations. They wanted a decent home, a good job, a safe environment for their families, good schools for their children, and almost none wanted to drive the whites into the sea. They just wanted their place in the sun. Everywhere else elections are