Thabo Mbeki famous quotes

Our experience over the last 20 years has shown that indeed people must themselves become their own liberators. You cannot wait for somebody else to come and rescue you.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Years #People #Waiting

When will the day come that our dignity will be fully restored, when the purpose of our lives will no longer be merely to survive until the sun rises tomorrow!
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Sun #Purpose #Dignity

Gloom and despondency have never defeated adversity. Trying times need courage and resilience. Our strength as a people is not tested during the best of times,
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Adversity #People #Resilience

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Country #People #Village

That surely must be a concern to anyone who decides this drug must be given to stop transmissions, again from mother to child, which is extremely costly and must be taken into account.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Mother #Children #Taken

I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Flower #Sea #Land

A global human society, characterised by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Future #Islands #Sea

We will continue to count on your unwavering support and commitment to working with leaders of our continent in bringing about the desired renaissance of Africa.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Commitment #Leader #Support

As Africans, we need to share common recognition that all of us stand to lose if we fail to transform our continent.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Needs #Common #Recognition

In Africa you have space...there a profound sense of space here, space and sky
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Space #Sky #Profound

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Thinking #Important #Taught

The people of Zimbabwe have a responsibility to ensure that the government that they elected behaves properly.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Responsibility #Zimbabwe #Government

A matter that seems to be very clear in terms of the alternative view, is what do you expect to happen in Africa with regard to immune systems, where people are poor, subject to repeat infections and all of that. Surely you would expect their immune systems to collapse.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Views #People #Alternatives

It's very worrying at this time in the world that any point of view should be prohibited, that's banned, there are heretics that should be burned at the stake.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Views #Worry #World

One of the matters that must be addressed is that Rwanda and Uganda have to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We're also supporting processes to ensure that the political dialogue among the Congolese themselves takes place so that the people there can decide their future.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Uganda #People #Political

How many murders are committed in Gauteng, or in the Western Cape, in a month? A week? A day? An hour? But of course we are not allowed to know for sure. In close and direct imitation of his apartheid models, Selebi ensures that no statistics about crime may be published regularly in the press.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Soccer #May #Statistics

I think the Internet is absolutely extraordinary. It's very, very useful and I think one of the things we've got to do is make sure that the African continent gets on to that information super highway.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Thinking #Information #Internet

If we only said safe sex, use a condom, we won't stop the spread of AIDS in this country.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Country #Sex #Safety

None dare challenge me when i say i am an Afrikan.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Challenges #Dare

Science is always inquiring.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Inquiring

Those who oppressed us described us as the Dark Continent!
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Dark #Swag #Continents

There is a very long list of parties in this year's election, some of the parties I have never heard of.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Party #Years #Long

As a consequence of the victories we have registered during our first ten years of freedom, we have laid a firm foundation for the new advances we must and will make during the next decade.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Years #Victory #Next

I don't imagine Heads of Government would ever be able to say I'm not an economist therefore I can't take decisions on matters of the economy; I'm not a soldier I can't take decisions on matters of defence; I'm not an educationist so I can't take decisions about education.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Government #Decision #Soldier

As we mourn President Mandela’s passing we must ask ourselves the fundamental question - what shall we do to respond to the tasks of building a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa, a people-centred society free of hunger, poverty, disease and inequality, as well as Africa’s renaissance, to whose attainment President Nelson Mandela dedicated his whole life?
-- Thabo Mbeki

#People #President #Tasks

South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Black And White #White #Black

I get a sense that we've all been educated into one school of thought. I'm not surprised at all to find among the overwhelming majority of scientists, are people who would hold one particular view because that's all they're exposed to.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#School #Views #People

If you sit in a position where decisions that you take would have a serious effect on people, you can't ignore a lot of experience around the world which says this drug has these negative effects.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#People #Decision #Drug

We are not being arrogant or complacent when we are said that our country, as a united nation, has never in its entire history, enjoyed such a confluence of encouraging possibilities.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Country #Arrogant #Possibility

One of the things that became clear, and which was actually rather disturbing, was the fact that there was a view which was being expressed by people whose scientific credentials you can't question
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Views #People #Facts

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Messages #Poor #Possibility

South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#White #Minorities #Criminals

We should never become despondent because the weather is bad, nor should we turn triumphalist because the sun shines.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Weather #Shining #Sun

Does HIV cause AIDS? Can a virus cause a syndrome? How? It can't, because a syndrome is a group of diseases resulting from acquired immune deficiency.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Doe #Hiv #Disease

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Future #Vision #Poverty

The concern around probable questions, which in a sense have been hidden, will grow around the world and the matter is critical, the reason we are doing all this is so we can respond correctly to what is reported to be a major catastrophe on the African continent.
-- Thabo Mbeki

#World #Matter #Reason

We do not accept that human society should be constructed on the basis of a savage principle of the survival of the fittest
-- Thabo Mbeki

#Future #Survival #Vision