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.
Too often, U.N. peacekeepers face an impossible task in countries that are still at war and where there is no real peace to keep.
Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.
We know that peace is only possible when it is the fruit of justice. True peace is a profound transformation by means of the force of nonviolence that is the power of love.
The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task.
When we see so many conflicts multiplying, the only way to allow the international community to be able to address those conflicts, the only way to allow the international community to act boldly, is with unity of the countries of the region, able to serve together and in the same universal principles.
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
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