Nelson Mandela

I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.

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

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

Appearances matter – and remember to smile.

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.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

Pity is for living, envy is for dead.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

Try not. Do or do not… there is no try.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.