Desmond Tutu Quotes

You will be emancipated from tyranny and oppression …

Once people who have been deprived of basic freedom taste a little of it, they want all of it.

In raising a people from slavery to freedom, you have called them to act on a new theatre; and it is a necessary part of your business, to teach them how to perform their parts.

When people decide they want to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.

Even in the darkest regions, people have discovered their right of freedom.

No man may make another free.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

Rights are in the power of the people.

Our job is to make people free.

A group oppressed, is a group enslaved ….Whenever a group, a community of people, in unison, feels that it is being oppressed, and that it wants to control its destiny, then that community has a moral right to seek effective redress, or demand to control its own destiny as appropriate

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man.

The sacred right of self government … has been so perverted so that if one man decides to enslave a second man, a third man may not object.

Freedom is not the natural state of mankind. It is a rare and wondrous thing.

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives; no one should be subject to the will of another.

In all the Arab countries I have been in, the people have said that they were not demonstrating for food. They wanted dignity.

Depend upon it that the lovers of freedom will be free.

The future belongs to freedom, not to fear.

Freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day

America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.... ...Liberty will come to those who love it.

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

A people that loves freedom will in the end be free.

I am a man who perceives life in a certain way, a man who rejects things that defecate on humankind, who rejects anything that will not give people room for dissent.

Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man ... the highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.