Oliver Tambo Quotes

Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.

Practically every violent conflict or social change has proved that violence unleashes violence in return.

People.. .love to say that 'Violence never solved anything.' But what solved Hitler? Was It a team of social workers? Was it putting daisies into the gun barrels of Nazi Panzer divisions? Was it a commission that tried to understand what made Hitler sorry? ?No. What solved Hitler was violence.

I'm still very aware of the violence in our culture, more so than other people. I know where it comes from when someone is trying to suppress someone else, sometimes they fight back.

My view is when you use violence on your people, that never ends well.

You are dealing with people who have taken the responsibility of killing their own because they think that they are right, they think that they are serving the interests of their people. They not going to give that up easily, just because you've shown up.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

I shall not lick the hand besmeared with the blood of my children, sisters, and brothers.

If officials are too forceful, people will revolt.

We cannot get stuck in a cycle of violence which cannot be broken.

Your body is a battleground.

Do the magistrates think of putting down our meeting by acts of violence? I for one think they do, and should we be attacked today, come what will, life, death, or victory, I am determined no house shall cover my head tonight. I am quite ready to stand by the law, and not to give our tyrants the slightest advantage in attacking us in sections; but should they employ force against us. I am repelling attack by attack.

Violence, indeed, is the child of suppression.

Violence is the only way to answer violence.

At the end of the day, violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid.

Government violence can only do one thing and that is to breed counter-violence.

If apartheid is removed, then the violence that is necessary to maintain it will be removed along with the pressures from apartheid which create a violent response.

I hold that the world is sick of armed rebellions.

I do not like violence, but ours is a violent time, and there are some men who understand nothing else.

Sometimes you must live in a violent world in order to get greater justice.

Christ said: Blessed are the peace-makers, not blessed are the peace-sayers. If the world fell into the hands of totalitarian factions, there is still the possibility that they might fight amongst themselves. Surrender to them would not encourage the kingdom of peace and love - and those that desire it, or with passionate intensity permit it, know not what they do.

What you get with violence can be maintained only with violence

Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.

You can't talk about peace nor agreement while terror is used as the main argument.

I came to the conclusion that war was an unacceptable way of solving whatever problems there were in the world--that there would be problems of tyranny, of injustice, of nations crossing frontiers and that injustice and tyranny should not be tolerated and should be fought and resisted, but the one thing that must not be used to solve that problem is war. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. And that fact overwhelms whatever moral cause is somewhere buried in the history of that war.