Desmond Tutu Justice Quotations

Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

And you remember the rainbow in the Bible is the sign of peace. The rainbow is the sign of prosperity. We want peace, prosperity and justice and we can have it when all the people of God, the rainbow people of God, work together.

There are different kinds of justice. Retributive justice is largely Western. The African underTutustanding is far more restorative - not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew.

When I care about black liberation, it is because I care about white liberation.

Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.

We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil.

Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, his will for us will prevail, love will prevail over hate, justice over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness.

That's the chief lesson I have learned: the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail.

Making the truth public is a form of justice. This is a moral universe and you've got to take account of the fact that truth and lies and goodness and evil are things that matter.

There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative allowing accountability to fall by the wayside is worse.

No future without forgiveness.

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.

Peace without justice is an impossibility.

There is no justice in killing in the name of justice.

I don't often want to speak. I try to be a reasonable person and to be diplomatic, but you go to that place and you see the settlements, you see what has happened to the land that was owned by the Palestinians. I have often said to my Jewish friends: "Please just remember where you come from. Remember Yahweh, who said to the Israelites, 'Treat the alien well with justice.'"

We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black and white.

Every situation of justice is an occasion where someone is being humiliated and they want to restore their dignity.