Sunday, February 28, 2016

Desmond Tutu: A Fundamental Law


 Quotes by Desmond Tutu

The fundamental law of human beings is interdependence. A person is a person through other persons.

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours."

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.

We spend billions on banks when we know that a fraction of this money could save all the children in the world. 

There's no way in which you can ever win a war against terror. As long as there are conditions in many parts of the world that make people desperate: poverty, disease, ignorance, etc. I hope that we will discover soon, that we can survive, only together. We can prosper only together. And I think people are beginning to realize this, that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think you can have a stable, secure world.

We must act now and wake up to our moral obligations. The poor and vulnerable are members of God's family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change. We, who should have been responsible stewards preserving our vulnerable, fragile planet home, have been wantonly wasteful through our reckless consumerism, devouring irreplaceable natural resources.

If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up in one another's, that we can be free only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family.

You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.



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