# Nelson Mandela

- Quotes: 23
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/nelson-mandela

## Books

- [Long Walk to Freedom](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nelson-mandela/long-walk-to-freedom.md) — 23 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

> No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

> The authorities liked to say that we received a balanced diet; it was indeed balanced — between the unpalatable and the inedible.

> There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

> You may succeed in delaying, but never in preventing the transition of South Africa to a democracy.

> When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

> There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

> Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

> I always knew that someday I would once again feel the grass under my feet and walk in the sunshine as a free man.

> It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
>
> When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

> Prison itself is a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is above all a test of one's commitment.

> I detest racialism because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.