“What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.”

— Desmond Tutu

As quoted in " Desmond Tutu turns 75 http://www.news24.com/World/News/Desmond-Tutu-turns-75-20061006" at News24 (6 October 2006)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Desmond Tutu 85

South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Priz… 1931

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) novelist, essayist

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), p. 17

“We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

“We protected our copyright because TotalBiscuit has no right to make advertising revenues with our license.”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

Stephane Woods is lying, and here's why."
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“Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

D 6
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

“And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom – how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

Love Over Scotland, chapter 68.
The 44 Scotland Street series

“There's what we did wrong and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people — by us and also by the enemy — but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now.”

Pol Pot (1925–1998) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea

Nate Thayer interview (1997)

“We stand then for freedom, because we claim the right to develop our own individuality and evolve our own destiny along our own lines, unembarrassed by what Western civilisation has to teach us and unhampered by the institutions which the West has imposed.”

Chittaranjan Das (1870–1925) Indian politician and leader of the Swaraj Party

Undelivered presidential address for the session of Indian Congress held at Ahmedabad in December 1921. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
1921

“Our nation is founded on the principle that we do not have kings. We have presidents. And the Constitution is our compass. When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something. To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?'”

John Lewis (civil rights leader) (1940) American politician and civil rights leader

For some, he concluded, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.
Source: Quoted in Impeachment is Over, But Don’t Despair by Diallo Brooks, CounterPunch https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/07/impeachment-is-over-but-dont-despair/, (7 Feb 2020)

“Not that any simple principle exists, and not that I couldn’t be wrong. But it seems to me—well, that which we are, our society or culture or what you want to name it, has a life and a right of its own.”

Poul Anderson book The People of the Wind

He drew breath. “Best beloved,” he said, “if communities didn’t resist encroachments, they’d soon be swallowed by the biggest and greediest. Wouldn’t they? In the end, dead sameness. No challenges, no inspirations from somebody else’s way. What service is it to life if we let that happen?

Chapter 19 (p. 175)
The People of the Wind (1973)

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.”

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Desmond Tutu 85

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