"In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights."

"The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated."

"The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it - oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible."

"We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity."

"The universe speaks in the silent dialect of universal natural laws. Such is the immutable nature of understanding — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live."

"It is a quiet truth that a leader does not command the wind, but sets the sails and steadies the crew."

"The moral compass points true only when freed from the magnetism of personal gain. For where clarity resides, peace inevitably follows — an essential principle for the reflective life."