Nelson Mandela

I am the captain of my soul.

Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?

I am not an optimist, but a great believer of hope.

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

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers; (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment; and Righteousness in the Earth.

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

We are free to yield to truth.

People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.