Long Walk to Freedom - Quotes

The following are some of the quotes from Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela:

• “A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones”
• “I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.”
• “I have never cared very much for personal prizes. A person does not become a freedom fighter in the hope of winning awards.”
• “A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle”
• “Life has a way of forcing decisions on those who vacillate”
• “I realized that they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. They could not take those things. Those things I still had control over. And I decided not to give them away.”
• “The authorities liked to say that we received a balanced diet; it was indeed balanced—between the unpalatable and the inedible.”
• “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.”
• “Virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know”