“Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.”

The tragedy is that things are not mended again.

I envision someday a great, peaceful South Africa in which the world will take pride, a nation in which each of many different groups will be making its own creative contribution.

When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for?

Then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi.

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.

Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret.

There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.

The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.

Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.

All roads lead to Johannesburg.

It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.

St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.

Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom.

The only way in which one can make endurable man’s inhumanity to man.

Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.

We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.

Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves.

What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [in Indian slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.

The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.

You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

God has created us all humanHe is kind & just to all. Why should we be unkind & unjust to each other?