Haile Selassie

I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential high-mindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests.

Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.

Peace demands the united efforts of us all. Who can foresee what spark might ignite the fuse?

We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.

The nations of Africa, as is true of every continent of the world, from time to time dispute among themselves. These quarrels must be confined to this continent and quarantined from the contamination of non-African interference.

Provision must be made for the extension of speedy and effective assistance when any African State is threatened with military aggression. We cannot rely solely on international morality.

They have a right to censure that have a heart to help: the rest is cruelty, not justice.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

Revolutions go not backward.

Remember who you are.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

The sky was the color of hard crimson, dripping down a canvas, the moon splashed silver across red. Her soothing balm healing my soul in swathes of calmness, I breathe in her tides and let my body be washed ashore, lying in the sands of eternity.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

Be ever on your guard what you say of anybody and to whom.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.