Winnie Mandela Quotes

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

Disenfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

It may be that apartheid brings such stupendous economic advantages to countries that they would sooner have apartheid than permit its destruction.

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.

There were two mentalities, and both mentalities had to change. There was what I called the Afrikaner mind set of the Unionist politicians, which was holding all power in their own hands, and discriminating, and their objective was to protect their identity.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

The kids growing up in the apartheid era were so restricted and angry - if they spoke out against it, they were thrown in jail.

Although black and white Americans live, work, and learn together now, there is still injustice in America.

I'm not saying to you that every element of segregation and discrimination and second-class citizenship has changed. But in the political sense, the world has changed. People now who want to vote can vote.

When you live under the power of terror and segregation, you can't ever start a work of art.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

Apartheid was in South Africa; now it has been transferred to Palestine.

Racial tolerance was not possible on American television in the early 1960s

If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but if he finds only whites among his judges… His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same alter.

Man has set man against man, Washed against unwashed.

What our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering and human hell, a jungle of wild beasts.

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

Apartheid is often misunderstood. It could just as easily be understood a policy of good neighborliness.

As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.

We have got to move away from the concept of race and color because that is what apartheid is. We cannot end apartheid if we retain these concepts.

Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.

The Achilles' heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like 'systemic racism' and 'structural inequality.'

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

The apartheid system renounces no violence.