Long Walk to Freedom

From Nelson Mandela's Autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom":

Apartheid - "It literally means 'apartness' and it represented the codification in one oppressive system of all the laws and regulations that had kept Africans in an inferior position to whites for centuries." (p. 97)

"The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people.  All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. . .Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character.  My country is rich in the minerals and gems that lie beneath its soil, but I have always known that its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purest diamonds." (p. 542)

"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."  (p. 542)

"I was not born with a hunger to be free.  I was born free - free in every way that I could know. . .It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken from me, that I began to hunger for it. . .But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free. . .Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains of all of my people were the chains on me.  It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black." (p. 543 - 544)

"Never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of on by another. . .The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement.  Let freedom reign.  God bless Africa!"  (p. 541 from his inauguration speech)