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In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.
All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.
But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.
God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.
The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.
The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.
In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.
Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.