Nelson Mandela quotes

Nelson Mandela

1918 – 2013

It always seems impossible until its done.

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what they had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?

Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear,
but the triumph over it.
The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid,
but he who conquers that fear.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements.

 

Books by / about Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Favorite African Folktales – Mandela picked out 32 folk tales, old and new, drawn from various African cultures, all rich in what Mandela calls “the gritty essence of Africa.
Conversations with Myself
Nelson Mandela: In His Own Words – collection of speeches
Long Walk to Freedom (adapted for children)