In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that's where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

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.

In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.