Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

There is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.

If you are to free yourselves you must break the chains of oppression yourselves. Only then can we express our dignity, only when we have liberated ourselves can we cooperate with other groups. Any acceptance of humiliation, indignity or insult is acceptance of inferiority.

I cannot forgive him [Nelson Mandela] for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with his jailer De Klerk. Hand in hand they went. Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.

Preventing the conflicts of tomorrow means changing the mindsets of the youth of today.

It was in the townships where we shed so much blood. Nothing could have been achieved without the sacrifice of the people. Black people.

Sport has the power to change the world.

The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism.

What I won’t do is take in two hundred thousand Syrians who could be ISIS… I have been watching this migration. And I see the people. I mean, they’re men. They’re mostly men, and they’re strong men. These are physically young, strong men. They look like prime-time soldiers. Now it’s probably not true, but where are the women?… So, you ask two things. Number one, why aren’t they fighting for their country? And number two, I don’t want these people coming over here.

Under Obama, the [Democratic] party was reduced to shambles at the local and state level, a particularly serious matter because the 2020 elections will determine redistricting, offering opportunities for gerrymandering even beyond today’s scandalous situation.

Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive [drug war] measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane.

You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.

I think we need more young people; we need to elect young people to government. We need to give them a chance, in the media, in politics, in democracy.

The situation is that in Germany capitalism has remained, classes and class struggle have remained which all the same will break into the open, which includes also the field of struggle of parties representing opposing classes just as it broke through in, let us say, Spain.

At the deepest level, the media contribute to the sense that the government is the enemy, and they suppress the sources of real power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions-the corporations, now international in scale -that control the economy and much of our social life.

We [U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.] can exist peacefully together if we don’t indulge in too much mutual fault-finding in all kinds of trifles.

In the execution of Presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

From the point of view of the policy makers, the long-term future of the country doesn’t matter so much. What matters is just those sectors of society that sustain concentrated privilege.

In France, to break the powerful labor movement, the US occupying forces needed strikebreakers and, more generally, goons. They reconstituted the Corsican Mafia for that purpose and, in payment, allowed them to restore the old heroin connection based in Marseilles…

When our interests matched, the Americans have been good to us, and when the interests differed, they wanted us to mold ourselves to them, which we refused.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.