Nelson Mandela Quotes

Who but shall learn that freedom is the prize Man still is bound to rescue or maintain; That nature's God commands the slave to rise, And on the oppressor's head to break the chain. Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, Till not a slave shall on this earth by found.

Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.

Emancipation - what is meant by it? Simply that the slaves shall cease to be held as property and shall henceforth be held and treated as human beings. Simply, that we should take our feet from off their necks.

To this wonderful page in our country's history another more glorious still will be added, and the slave shall show at last to his free brothers a sharpened sword forged from the links of his fetters.

Poverty Corrodes Freedom

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Wars are bred by poverty and oppression. Continued peace is possible only in a relatively free and prosperous world.

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.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

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

There can be no freedom for Africa without justice; and no justice without declaring war on Africa's poverty, disease and famine with as much vehemence as we remove the tyrant and the terrorist.

We don't hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression!

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

So keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds.

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.

Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them.

Freeing people from oppression and despair is eternally right.

My passion today is not only justice for the Black man and woman of America, but for all those who cry out to the Supreme Being for justice in their lives - and that's Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and White, for the whole of humanity has been deprived of that which The Creator has ordered for us, and that is freedom, justice, equality, and submission to the Will of Allah.

The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

None of us can think we are exempt from concerns for the poor and for social justice.

Freedom is a hard-bought thing and millions are in chains, but they strain toward the new day drawing near.

What the world needs is not redemption from sin but redemption from hunger and oppression; it has no need to pin its hopes upon Heaven, it has everything to hope for from this earth.