Apartheid Life Quotes & Sayings

I've heard I've been called a bad boy, or difficult. — Alex Pettyfer

I wanted to hit him hard now.
I wanted to hit him in the dark of the night's ending, hit him in the thunder of Thor's providential storm, hit him under the lash of Thor's lightning, strike him in the wind and the rain of the gods. I would bring him chaos. — Bernard Cornwell

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking. — Alan Greenspan

But you're acting like that's the end of the story, that the brokenness is the final answer. When you know very well that it's not. You've always said that at the end of the story the world will be healed, fixed, all wrongs finally righted. And that what's broken is being redeemed, little by little, even now. — Noelle Adams

The nature of ambition is that it requires casualties. — Michael Dobbs

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school. — St. Lucia

Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity. — Cornel West

Except now everything is digital even murder. There is a record for everything under the sun from the moon and back whether we like it or not. The image that I have of the future is that it is very bleak. It is darkness visible. The black dog of depression will hang us all in the end. Considering the life we live, the values we teach our children, what we believe in everything is a movement for change and every pause between words is a revolutionary act. The 'struggle' was like a painful mental illness. The liberation in retrospect was either the exit from our slavery ushering us into a novel, brave, bold and brilliant world or a mass hallucination. The political climate in post-apartheid South Africa has gone as far as corrupting liberty. — Abigail George

Smiles come naturally to me, but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command. I studied all the time. I looked at magazines, I'd practice in front of the mirror and I'd ask photographers about the best angles. I can now pull out a smile at will. — Tyra Banks

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service ... — Peggy Noonan

To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of huger and deprivation is to dehumanize them. But such has been the terrible fate of all black persons in our country under the system of apartheid. — Nelson Mandela

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy ... and I believed that I didn't really have a function as a useful artist in that anymore. — Athol Fugard

It's hard to believe she's the same girl from Taco Bell. Beth was hard and shut down that night. The girl on my bed is open and soft. — Katie McGarry

At the time of his death, Biko had a wife and three children for which he left a letter that stated in one part: I've devoted my life to see equality for blacks, and at the same time, I've denied the needs of my family. Please understand that I take these actions, not out of selfishness or arrogance, but to preserve a South Africa worth living in for blacks and whites. — Steve Biko

War and peace. There are blurred lines in the realities of both. A separation anxiety as the paradigm shifts from the air that a sniper wears on his face (real life, entertainment for the masses or the propaganda machine you decide), to the blueprint of an assassination in a driveway (Chris Hani lying in a pool of his own blood). You know that we cannot eat stones but we can burn, butcher, necklace, murder, forcibly remove and displace entire families, races of different faiths in the name of apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Chris Hani instruments of change, war, tolerance or peace. The Romantics got it right before anyone else did. Truth is beauty. The truth is South Africa is not cool anymore. — Abigail George

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. — Nadine Gordimer

Mrs Islam is what you call a respectable type." Nazneen tried a snore.
"Razia, on the other hand, I would not call a respectable type. I'm not saying anything against her. But what is her background? Her husband does some menial sort of job. He is uneducated. He is probably illiterate. Perhaps he can write his name. If he can't write his name, he will put a cross. Razia cuts her hair like a tramp. Perhaps she calls it fashion. I don't know. Her son is roaming around the estate like a vagabond, throwing stones and what have you. When I spoke to him he put his fingers in his nose, like this, and made a face like this. — Rohinton Mistry

For weeks after 9/11 you could smell the dust and pulverised concrete in New York, and the National Guard came in, so there was a military presence on the streets. It was intense. Overwhelming. Heartbreaking. — Mark Boal

I am sure you have heard that appearance doesn't matter and that it's what's on the inside that counts. Well that of course is utter nonsense, because if no one cared about what's on the outside no one would take a bath or comb their hair and the world would be a lot smellier than it already is! — Lemony Snicket

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself. — Athol Fugard

My mom was a seamstress, and I wish I'd learned to sew because I'm obsessed with 'Project Runway!' — Carmen Electra

She didn't understand what it was like to be filled with a love so strong that it made your chest ache - a love you could only feel and not express. Keeping love buried was a lot like keeping anger pent up, I'd learned. It just ate you up inside until you wanted to scream or kick something. — Richelle Mead

For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue. — Athol Fugard

Sunflowers and seashells and logarithmic spirals (said Kerewin); sweep of galaxies and the singing curve of the universe (said Kerewin); the oscilating wave thrumming in the nothingness of every atom's heart (said Kerewin); did you think I could build a square house? So the round shell house holds them all in its spiralling embrace. Noise and riot, peace and quiet, all is music in this sphere. — Keri Hulme

But suffering from a life-threatening disease also helped me have a different attitude and perspective. It has given a new intensity to life, for I realize how much I used to take for granted-the love and devotion of my wife, the laughter and playfulness of my grandchildren, the glory of a splendid sunset, the dedication of my colleagues. The disease has helped me acknowledge my own mortality, with deep thanksgiving for the extraordinary things that have happened in my life, not least in recent times. What a spectacular vindication it has been, in the struggle against apartheid, to live to see freedom come, to have been involved in finding the truth and reconciling the differences of those who are the future of our nation. — Desmond Tutu

There was a Sears, Roebuck catalogue painfully twisted and shellacked and tied with a red cord. The white card beneath it said, An inexpensive doorstop." ... There were catsup bottles made into bud vases, closthespins decorated with crepe paper butterflies for use as curtin hold-backers, crocheted bags for silverware, bouquets of crepe paper and velvet flowers, an enormous funeral set piece of white organdy gardenias and dark green oilcloth leaves with REST IN PEACE spelled out in white pipe cleaners, embroidered pictures, burned wood match boxes, and fancy pillows by the hundreds. The pillows embraced every sentiment from FRANKY AND JOHNNY WERE LOVERS in black beads on a cerise satin background to the Twenty-Third Psalm in white on black velvet. It was an impressive exhibit of what loneliness can do to people. — Betty McDonald

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant. — Athol Fugard

Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell - the strange inverse sense of apartheid. — Chris Abani