South Africa Quotes - Page 7

• People were encouraged to snitch. [South Africa] was a police state, so there were police everywhere. There were undercover police. There were uniformed police. The state was being surveilled the entire time.

  Trevor Noah

  People, Police, Snitch

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I was lucky to come along for the ride. [My mother] really is an amazing woman. And the world we lived in in South Africa at the time was a very matriarchal society because so many black men had been removed from the home.

  Trevor Noah

  Mother, Home, Men

  Source: www.npr.org

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• With this job, always traveling on the plane and everything, I thought it would be really difficult to quit drinking on my own because you're always in situations where it's acceptable to have drinks. So I decided right after a show that I was going to go into treatment. I Googled a bunch of places, and I found this place that I went to in Cape Town, South Africa, called Stepping Stones. I stayed there for a month. It was really difficult-lots of talking and crying.

  Lara Stone

  Drinking, Quitting, Cry

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• For you in the West to hear the phrase 'All men are created equal' is to draw a yawn. For us, it's a miracle. We're starting out at rock bottom, man. But South Africa does have soul.

  Athol Fugard

  Men, Rocks, Miracle

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• I think the aloe is one of South Africa's most powerful, beautiful and celebratory symbols. It survives out there in the wild when everything else is dried.

  Athol Fugard

  Beautiful, Powerful, Thinking

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• We learn that Comrade [President of South Africa Nelson] Mandela has announced in a speech that he hopes for a bright future in South Africa for ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ Anyone who has thought about it realizes that liberty and equality are antithetical concepts. You can have one, or you can have the other, but you certainly cannot have both. As to that, either concept is a rather futile goal. Equality is biologically impossible, and liberty is only obtainable in homogeneous populations very thinly spread.

  Jeff Cooper

  Goal, President, Liberty

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• The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

  Doris Lessing

  Philosophy, Army, Should Have

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.

  John Muir

  Years, America, Hot

  John Muir, Terry Gifford (1996). “John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings”, p.872, The Mountaineers Books

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• The Anglo-Saxon has established himself in climates totally diverse - Canada, South Africa, and India - and, through several generations, has preserved his essential race characteristics. He is not, of course, superior to climatic influences; but even in warm climates, he is likely to retain his aggressive vigor long enough to supplant races already enfeebled.

  Josiah Strong

  Race, Long, Generations

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• Many South Africans qualify for working visas in the UK and are keen to experience working and living overseas. However, more and more young people are rebelling against the materialistic 'me' generation and are keen to find meaningful work during their stay.

  Susan Harris

  Meaningful, People, Generations

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• When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening to his records: The Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, all the big American jazz bands, and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, and Kitty White, a singer from the US who was a friend of Nina Simone. Nobody in America seems to know about her, but she was quite popular in South Africa.

  Miriam Makeba

  Brother, Player, White

  "Miriam Makeba: Mama Africa Goes Home". J. Poet, Crawdaddy! Magazine, February 11, 2009.

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• South Africans will kick down a statue of a dead white man but won’t even attempt to slap a live one. Yet they can stone to death a black man simply because he’s a foreigner

  Robert Mugabe

  Men, White Man, Black

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• My grandparents all came from Lithuania to South Africa. My first novel, Middlepost, is a fictional account of that journey.

  Antony Sher

  Grandparent, Lithuania, South

  "Antony Sher: 'Painting and writing stop me going crazy'". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. January 14, 2012.

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• I'm always very proud of belonging to three minorities: gay, Jewish, white South African.

  Antony Sher

  Gay, White, Three

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• In South Africa, success never presented the problems that it presents in New York. In New York, if you happen to be the flavor of the month, a lot of nonsense comes with it into your life.

  Athol Fugard

  New York, Flavor Of The Month, Months

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• We always seem to be surprised by events, especially by catastrophes, but also by wonderful events. Look at 1990, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and apartheid in South Africa collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. I don't know anyone who foresaw those events. It seems to me that as a species we are constantly trying to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. In the meantime, we talk as if we are in control, and we're not. This seems to me to be the truth about the twentieth century.

  Doris Lessing

  Wall, Trying, Unexpected

  Source: progressive.org

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• What I supported when I was a young man, was that the solution to bring justice to all in South Africa, was to build a little Europe there. Was to create so many nation states as there are actual nations, each with their own cultures, each with their own languages, that is what separate development tried and wanted to achieve.

  Frederik Willem de Klerk

  Men, Justice, Culture

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, White

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• Criminal trials are fundamentally about individual accountability whereas truth commissions are less about the guilt of the perpetrator and more about the suffering of the victim. A criminal trial is only incidentally a therapeutic or cathartic process for victims. But truth commissions, as we saw in South Africa, have the advantage of giving tens of thousands of people the opportunity to tell their stories, and not only does that contribute to healing but it also contributes to reconciliation, especially when perpetrators also come and express contrition.

  Payam Akhavan

  Healing, Opportunity, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Fifteen years after the new dispensations started in South Africa, if one looks back, there are reasons to be positive and say we have achieved what we wanted to achieve, but there are also reasons for concern. Not everything turned out exactly as I would have liked it to turn out. On the positive side, we have a good constitution, there has been no effort to really amend the constitution and change the values and the principles contained therein and in our bill of rights.

  Frederik Willem de Klerk

  Effort, Being Positive, Constitution

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Without white South Africa realizing what it had done - and on the basis of that realization having the courage to ask for forgiveness - there can really be no significant movement.

  Athol Fugard

  White, Done, Realization

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• Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.

  Kingsley Amis

  Cheer, Believe, Reality

  Kingsley Amis (1992). “Lucky Jim”, Penguin Classics

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• Race is not the only differential in South Africa, in the new South Africa, where all schools are open, mother-tongue education is a very big issue. One of the main reasons why the dropout figure of black students, and the lower pass rate of black students in the present education system, and it was like that before, was that we didn't have mother-tongue education.

  Frederik Willem de Klerk

  School, Black, Students

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• Acting is rare. You can be rehearsing Ibsen with Sir Richard Eyre and suddenly he has to take a call on his mobile telling him his friend Arthur Miller has died. Or you can come back from a job on the Isle of Man to be told by your agent you're going straight out to South Africa on another shoot. There's not even any time to wash your pants.

  Jamie Sives

  Jobs, Men, Acting

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• I find it terribly distracting in movies when people do accents, I must say, unless it's terribly serious and the story is rooted in South Africa and you're doing a South African accent. But in period movies I think nothing can be more distracting than people doing accents.

  Paul W. S. Anderson

  Thinking, People, Serious

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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