Desmond Tutu Quotes

This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.

May we not succumb to thoughts of violence and revenge today, but rather to thoughts of mercy and compassion. We are to love our enemies that they might be returned to their right minds.

When there is life and mankind, a person will live striving for good deeds, liberty and a bright life, and wish that goodness and justice will reign in the world.

I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.

War is not the answer, because only love can conquer hate.

Force may subdue, but love gains, and he that forgives first wins the laurel.

Until we have created a romance of peace that would equal that of war, violence will not disappear from people's lives.

The Bible calls us to love our neighbors, and to do justice and love kindness, not to indiscriminately kill one another.

I am deeply spiritual; I revel in those things that make for good - the things that we can do to shed a little light, to help place an oft-dissonant universe back in tune with itself... Long live art, long live friendship, long live the joy of life!

The Universal Zulu Nation stands to acknowledge wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, and equality, peace, unity, love, and having fun, work, overcoming the negative through the positive, science, mathematics, faith, facts, and the wonders of God, whether we call him Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, or Jah.

Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth.

Peace does not mean just to stop wars, but also to stop oppression and injustice.

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.

I believe in humans.

For the cruel man who would tear out the heart with which I live, I do not cultivate thistles. I cultivate a white rose.

The highest religious and spiritual ideals of any faith would invite us to a compassion for all lives destroyed by the violence that plagues us.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

Be persecuted, rather than be a persecutor. Be crucified, rather than be a crucifier. Be treated unjustly, rather than treat anyone unjustly. Be oppressed, rather than be an oppressor. Be gentle rather than zealous. Lay hold of goodness, rather than justice.

In a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.

Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.

When we call something unfair or indecent or unconscionable or evil, when we speak of mercy and pity and compassion, those words have meaning, regardless of our particular faith or moral philosophy. They appeal to common standards we all are expected to understand and accept, standards without which we could not live any common life at all.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.