If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
Interpretation
To achieve peace, one must engage with those who oppose you rather than just conversing with allies.
Desmond Tutu emphasizes that true peace comes from addressing conflicts and engaging in dialogue with adversaries, rather than merely discussing issues with friends who share your views. This approach encourages understanding and reconciliation, suggesting that confronting differences is essential for lasting peace.
In practice
In a speech about conflict resolution, one might say, 'As Desmond Tutu stated, if you want peace, you talk to your enemies.'
The fossil reserves that have already been discovered exceed what can ever be safely used. Yet companies spend half a trillion dollars each year searching for more fuel. They should redirect this money toward developing clean energy solutions
As much as the world has an instinct for evil and is a breeding ground for genocide, holocaust, slavery, racism, war, oppression, and injustice, the world has an even greateer instinct for goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love.
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.
Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.
Gaza is going to test who believes in the worth of human beings.
I cease not to advocate peace; even though unjust it is better than the most just war.
Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions whose chief concern is the long future of themselves and their children will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it.
If Catholics and Jews can today come together regularly for talks after so many tears and so much blood have been shed, than Jews and Arabs must be able to do the same.
I dream of an Africa which is in peace with itself.
The Department of Peace would take a more human approach to healing our society, looking not merely for ways we can destroy an enemy, but for more powerful ways to create new friends. While the State Department engages in international diplomacy, there is no domestic parallel. There is no department seeking to harness the power of a nonviolent heart.
Working for peace in the future is to work for peace in the present moment.
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