Desmond Tutu Quotes

Reconciliation does not mean covering history with a blanket. Reconciliation means truth, justice and love. Justice without love can degenerate into vengeance. We need to know the truth for medicinal reasons, so that what happened … will never happen again.

Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.

You can't demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth - people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.

How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?

As the victim, you offer the gift of your forgiving to the perpetrator who may or may not appropriate the gift but it has been offered and thereby it liberates the victim.

South Africans must recall the terrible past so that we can deal with it, forgiving where forgiveness is necessary but never forgetting.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

What we forgive too freely doesn't stay forgiven.

It's not easy to forgive. I definitely don't forget, but I do forgive and I think that you should.

Only true remorse and "Will you forgive me?" can press the reset button.

There can be no healing without truth.

Forgive! How many will say, forgive, and find a sort of absolution in the sound to hate a little longer!

We can forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children.

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who 'forgives' you--out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation through another's sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.

It is possible to have pardon without forgiveness-a murderer can be pardoned by the governor, but that does not mean the victim's family has forgiven him. And there can be forgiveness without pardon.

Nothing brings families together faster than forgiveness. That should make it Step No. 1, but most of us find forgiving hard. We associate it with weakness and losing when, actually, the reverse is true. When you forgive, you gain strength and come out a winner. You break free of control by the other person's actions.

We recall our terrible past so that we can deal with it, to forgive where forgiveness is necessary, without forgetting; to ensure that never again will such inhumanity tear us apart; and to move ourselves to eradicate a legacy that lurks dangerously as a threat to our democracy.

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.

Repentance doth alter a man's case with God: and therefore repentance should alter the case between one man and another.

The words 'I will forgive you, but I'll never forget what you've done' never explain the real nature of forgiveness.

If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

All this time, Lev ever realized what he needed. He did not need to be adored or pitied. He needed to be forgiven. Not by God, who is all forgiving. Not by people like Marcus and Pastor Dan, who would always stand by his side. He needed to be forgiven by an unforgiving world.

Hopefully America will forgive me.

I have discovered that most people who tell me that they cannot forgive a person who wronged them are handicapped by a mistaken understanding of what forgiving is.