Are you one of the multitude caught up in the World Cup of Soccer...excuse me, Football? I feel that we in Oshawa and the region are so fortunate to have so many residents with roots to so many of these competing nations.
Nelson Mandela had a dream to bring these games to South Africa and I am sure he was discouraged from many sides. Yet here are these games being played in a country that within living memory had suffered under apartheid for decades.
Mandela once said, “I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.”
You will recall Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for his political views, being first imprisoned in the notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island seven kilometres off the coast of Cape Town. Back in the 1960s, in his own defence at the end of one of the trials against him, he stated, “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
After more than 25 years of wrongful imprisonment, he was released in February 1990. Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life's work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier. In a life that symbolizes the triumph of the human spirit over man's inhumanity to man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to his land. By 1994 Nelson Mandela was installed as president of South Africa.
In no particular order here are 10 of my favourite Mandela quotes. I trust you find these inspirational as well.
1. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
2. “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
3. “If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness.”
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