Together we have travelled a long road to be where we are today. This has been a road of struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression.
Thabo MbekiRead
South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes inclusivity and shared ownership of a nation by all its inhabitants, regardless of race.
Thabo Mbeki's quote asserts that South Africa is a collective heritage that belongs to everyone who resides within its borders, irrespective of their racial background. This statement advocates for unity and acknowledges the diverse tapestry of the nation, promoting the idea that true belonging is based on shared humanity rather than racial divisions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about national unity during a celebration of South African heritage.
Together we have travelled a long road to be where we are today. This has been a road of struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression.
A global human society, characterised by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable
Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.
Our experience over the last 20 years has shown that indeed people must themselves become their own liberators. You cannot wait for somebody else to come and rescue you.
As we mourn President Mandela’s passing we must ask ourselves the fundamental question - what shall we do to respond to the tasks of building a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa, a people-centred society free of hunger, poverty, disease and inequality, as well as Africa’s renaissance, to whose attainment President Nelson Mandela dedicated his whole life?
Gloom and despondency have never defeated adversity. Trying times need courage and resilience. Our strength as a people is not tested during the best of times.
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.
I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.
It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.
It is only when human beings see themselves simply as human beings, no longer as gods, that they are in a position to perceive the wholly other nature of God.
There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.
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