Mengistu Haile Mariam Quotes

Don't talk to me about what's happened since [Nelson] Mandela! His successor was absolutely hopeless - "no such thing as AIDS" - and this present President... It's a tragedy, you know, what's happened there post-Mandela, because he was an iconic figure.

I think it's a good thing for a president or political leaders to want to put their values or their faith into action. Desmond Tutu did that in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. did that here. This is a good thing.

Obama's not down for the civil rights struggle, and he certainly wasn't down for the apartheid struggle, but he's clearly gonna take advantage of it and insert himself in such a way as to make it look like he is single-handedly responsible for apartheid going by the wayside.

It was a day of liberation-not only for black South Africans but also for us white South Africans. Suddenly, the burden of three hundred and fifty years had been lifted from our shoulders. For the first time we could greet all our countrymen without guilt or fear as equals and as fellow South Africans. When I awoke that morning I was still the president of South Africa. When I went to bed the mantle had passed from me to Nelson Mandela. Few heads of government could ever have laid aside their high office with a greater sense of accomplishment, regardless of the uncertainties of the future.

Mr. De Klerk does not get the credit that he deserves [for dismantling apartheid.]

Come look at the television. Nelson Mandela is being released from prison in South Africa. This is the most important event in your lifetime.

A wide gap still exists between the mass democratic movement and your party with regard to the method of attaining those values, but your commitment to a non-racial democracy in a United South Africa has won you many friends in the extra-parliamentary movement.

The victory of democracy in South Africa is the common achievement of all humanity.

I said to my people, "We're knocking apartheid off but we've got to be prepared to assist them." And I sent senior people over there to assist the incoming South African regime to go about the economic plan.

So, my friends, in a week or so the Governor-General will swear in a new government.

There is nothing radical about Obama except the fact of who he is.

Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing 'Kumbaya'. We don't really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.

I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government - the Kennedy administration at that time - into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen.

I was elected to come to an incredibly dysfunctional capital and make the government work better, and that's what I'm doing.

White society will not listen to preaching. They will not listen to their liberals. Liberalism has not grown within white society, and we blacks cannot stand idly by watching the situation. We can only generate a response from white society when we, as blacks, speak with a black voice and say what we want. Now has come the time when we, as blacks, must articulate what we want, and put it across to the white man, and from a position of strength.

The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

Tell them, please, that I am deeply humbled by the goodwill, the self discipline, the courage, the wisdom of this group of Montgomery Negroes.

The use of power to bring about radical social and political change in the 1860s carries important implications for the use of federal power to bring about change in matters of race, citizenship, and social welfare today. So long as this remains true—and there us no sign that these issues will go away any time soon.

The people who are opposing the policy of apartheid have not the courage of their convictions. They do not marry non-Europeans.

I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.

Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.

I want to see Nelson walking down the streets of South Africa; I want to see him walking hand-in-hand with Winnie Mandela.

Do you realize, when Mandela was inaugurated president, he invited as his special guests the white jailers from his Robben Island prison? He literally did forgive everybody.