Nelson Mandela Quotes

Apartheid cannot be reformed. It has to be eliminated.

Our target is not negotiations, it is the end of the apartheid system. There can be no compromise about that.

It feels that while the young people are trying to fight for a world where there's equality, everyone's the same, everyone's helping each other, we want to take care of the planet... it seems like the people that are ruling and are being presidents right now want to do it the other way round.

Peoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable. Nor will they perceive the distribution of wealth and resources between nations to be unalterably ordained by heaven and incapable of drastic rearrangement by the less than gentle manipulation of man.

Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

There are many white people in this country who realize that the system itself - as it is constructed - is not so constructed that it can produce freedom and equality for the negro, and the system has to be changed.

If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.

On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. "A Time to Break Silence," at Riverside Church

One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.

Investment that only goes to enrich an already wealthy elite bent on monopolizing both economic and political power cannot contribute toward égalité and justice - the foundation stones for a sound democracy.

We don't hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they're not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo.

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come - and gone. It's time for change in America.

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.

Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty.

This white man who is saying "it takes time." For three hundred and more years they have had "time," and now it is time for them to listen.

A grievance is a political action. It's not just African-Americans.

I regard philanthropy as a tragic apology for wrong conditions under which human beings live.

Envy is always referred to by its political alias, 'social justice’.

When a black person has no electricity, no water, they call it the ghetto. When white people have no electricity and no water, they call it camping.

We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.

Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they're not at all the same. But they're both symptoms inside the white male power structure.

I'm just seeing as I grow older, and hopefully wiser, that a lot of things I see from a race perspective are class problems too, so I should be advocating for all.

A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it's that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.