Quotes by South African Authors - Page 12

A believe in yourself is powerful enough to turn you into a world leader while self-doubt and self-pity are powerful enough to turn you into a street loiterer
Nicky Verd
You can never be fully human unless you've discovered the humanity in other human beings. Don't close your eyes to the injustices of your own country by trying to solve the injustices of another country. That's an evasion of Christian responsibility.
Beyers Naudé
The best words of wisdom that a parent can say to their child is "I Am proud of you".
Unarine Ramaru
Before We BeginIs Your Bug A nice clean original car that looks almost like itleft the showroom yesterday?P.S. All work should be carried out in consultation with a reliable workshop manual with regard to torque settings, gaps, procedures, sequences disassembly, reassembly, where to hide the leftover parts, etc. I will accept no responsibility for anything resulting fromyou or anybody else trying anything as described in this document whatsoever – but if it works or you end up with some amusing stories to tell someone else’s grandchildren, please feel free to drop me a line. (No death threats please.)Sincerely,Christina Engela
Christina Engela
Every leader has a right to lead followers in the right direction and the responsibility to empower them to achieve much more.
Gift Gugu Mona
Great leaders do not shift responsibility even if it means acknowledging their own failures.
Gift Gugu Mona
Since her diagnoses she has been fading like a light bulb with cancer’s hand on the rotary dimmer.
Danielle Esplin
Too often people mistake monsters for gods.
Monique Snyman
Not all ‘whites’ are racists. Not all racists are ‘white.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.
Nadine Gordimer
You cannot fix racism with more racism.
Christina Engela
When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today.
Ferial Haffajee
In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.
Trevor Noah
My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.
Trevor Noah
Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.
Trevor Noah
Sense isn’t democratic. A senseless opinion that’s advocated by 'the majority' is still senseless.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sense isn’t democratic. An opinion uttered by 99 people does not necessarily make more sense than an opposing opinion that was uttered by one person.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.
Nadine Gordimer
How can you put human rights to a popular vote and call it democracy? How many times do you need to redefine or haggle about the meaning of the word EQUALITY.
Christina Engela
Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.
Mark Gevisser
Traffic in Joburg is like the democratic process. Every time you think it's going to get moving and take you somewhere, you hit another jam.
Lauren Beukes
Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.
Bryce Courtenay
It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.
J.M. Coetzee
Without desire how is it possible to make a story?
JM Coetzee
The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance.
J.M. Coetzee
To have a positive influence on someone's life is a blessing.
Unarine Ramaru
Success shouldn't be revenge or a way to overwhelm the naysayers. If that is your reason, you are far from being content.
Unarine Ramaru
The bad parts of the statute are not judicially severable, I consider, from the rest of its provisions that deal with imprisonment. Their roots are entangled too tenaciously in the surrounding soil for a clean extraction to be feasible. The conclusion to which I accordingly come is that we are left with no option but to declare those provisions as a whole to be constitutionally invalid on account of their objectionable overbreadth.
John Didcott
If the good is not dependent on the bad and can be separated from it, one gives effect to the good that remains after the separation if it still gives effect to the main objective.
Johann Kriegler
The difference between the past and the present is that individual freedom and security no longer fall to be protected solely through the D vehicle of common-law maxims and presumptions which may be altered or repealed by statute, but are now protected by entrenched constitutional provisions which neither the Legislature nor the Executive may abridge. It would accordingly be improper for us to hold constitutional a system which, as Sachs J has noted, confers on creditors the power to consign the person of an impecunious debtor to prison at will and without the interposition at the crucial time of a judicial officer.
Pius Langa
My conclusions, on this point, are as follows: when the Law Commission says committal of judgment debtors is an anomaly that cannot be justified and should be abolished; when it is common cause that there is a general international move away from imprisonment for civil debt, of which the present committal proceedings are an adapted relic; when such imprisonment has been abolished in South Africa, save for its contested form as contempt of court in the magistrate's court; when the clauses concerned have already been interpreted by the Courts as restrictively as possible, without their constitutionally offensive core being eviscerated; when other tried and tested methods exist for recovery of debt from those in a position to pay; when the violation of the fundamental right to personal freedom is manifest, and the procedures used must inevitably possess a summary character if they are to be economically worthwhile to the creditor, then the very institution of civil imprisonment, however it may be described and however well directed its procedures might be, in itself must be regarded as highly questionable and not a compelling claimant for survival.
Albie Sachs
Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation.
Albie Sachs
This was his first trip on the Ossifar Distana, his first real splash in life. Look what it got him. Mister Smiff liked anonymity. He kept a low profile, often traveling under assumed names, claiming to be anything from a banker to a (very) successful life insurance salesman. He’d never broken the law, at least not irreparably. He was quite generous, well liked, sponsoring many charities anonymously – which is why it was so surprising to find him floating face down in the private spa in his apartment, murdered. He had been murdered, unless it was a freak shaving accident. Those old razors weren’t called cut-throats for nothing. Yikes.
Christina Engela
I can't imagine why a media company views a law preventing the commission of hate speech as a restriction on media freedom, but it is probably similar to how some religious folk view hate speech as being essential to religious freedom.
Christina Engela
You can pass any law you like to make 'criminals' of those you don't like and then justify it with whatever stupid reasoning that appeals to you. Is that rule of law - or tyranny?
Christina Engela
the perhaps rather prosaic truth that law is an imperfect yet indispensable vehicle by which both to conserve and transform society
Raymond Wacks
As truly as God by His power oncecreated, so truly by that same power must God every moment maintain.
Andrew Murray
Talent does not search for the person, in fact the person needs to search for the talent inside him and take it out to show the world.
Unarine Ramaru
An enlightened thinker does not waste his precious time thinking about what others think of what he thinks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Maybe the Truth of the Meaning of Life, Ancient and Arcane Knowledge of the Great Unknowable Universe is handed down only to persons presenting with the correct brand-name footwear. If you turn up wearing Shoe City knock-offs, you don't get to pass Go and collect Infinite Enlightenment.
Tracy Engelbrecht
Sleeping is the most common attempt to temporarily escape reality.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life is merely one very long day that routinely gets dark to give people a sensible excuse to keep their eyes closed for 8 hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If giving to the needy makes me sleep every night, then I will do it everyday.
Gugu Mona
When something hurts them, they weep.By night, they rest, they sleep
Christina Engela
For the gaming fishermen there was the Whatoosie River and its native cocka-snoek, the main game fish of the resident Skegg’s Valley Dynamite Fishing Club. Cocka-snoek were wily and tough and rather too bright for mere fish. You wouldn’t catch much with a rod around here. Many inexperienced visitors would find the bait stolen from their hooks, which punctuated the discovery that their lines had somehow got snagged and tangled irretrievably around some underwater obstruction – sometimes tied together with neat little bows. Often, several direct hits with hand grenades were needed to stun the creatures long enough just to catch them, gut them and fry them, but these former military types had become experts at it. For a modest fee, tours could be arranged via the booking office, which included an overnight stay on the banks of the river where one could drop off to a great night’s sleep after a satisfying meal of cocka-snoek done on an open fire, and the sound the bits of shrapnel made rattling in your stomach.
Christina Engela
If making a difference in someone else’s life makes me sleep every night, then I will do it everyday.
Gugu Mona
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
J.M. Coetzee
Never commit to what you are not willing to do.
Gift Gugu Mona
Never attempt to take your own or somebody else's life because someday you will account for that.
Gift Gugu Mona
When you run your own race, don't worry about the next person's pace; mind yours, after all this is your own race not theirs.
Gift Gugu Mona
To teach, learn. To learn, teach.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The world might not see it or think of it,But you are enough to have someonesacrificed for you.That should tell you that not every hardshipyou go through is permanent,It is just temporary.It's like a starter,You still have the dessert to enjoy.
Nomthandazo Tsembeni
I could die a million times if my death would be the reason our love would live forever.
Nomthandazo Tsembeni
Inspiration shouldn't respond to time, rather the other way around. Time must be altered to inspiration, "Timing is wrong" NO! Timing is never wrong. Sacrifice and the likes gets thrown in at this point.
Unarine Ramaru
Not everyone who has helped or is helping you wanted or wants to help you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sometimes I hate him. When he does the dishes, he shakes off each one before setting it in the drying rack. Water flies everywhere. A couple of drops always hit me in the face. I have to leave the room to avoid smashing a plate against his head.
Tarryn Fisher
Employees leave where they work. Employers live where they work.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To some people, employment is a distraction. To all entertainers, distraction is employment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The difference between a retiring man and a used condom is that the condom isn’t given a golden watch to inspire the illusion that it still matters to whomever that has just used it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana