Nelson Mandela

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

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

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

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

Appearances matter – and remember to smile.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.