Quotes by South African Authors - Page 14

The right vision to a wrong person is like the right seed to wrong soil.
Gift Gugu Mona
People are entitled to different opinions and views. Just because somebody doesn't agree with you doesn't mean they're wrong. Within the context of their reality they feel just as right, as you do within the context of your reality. Appreciate and respect that and perhaps in time you'll find even ground.
Deon Potgieter
Employment is an employee’s kissing of an employer’s ass. A salary is the employer’s pretense to be cleaning his ass.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A moral judgment of abortion is the usage of a man-made ideology to judge a man-made technology.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Smartphones are tools which fools fiddle with when they are around people that they don’t have the courage, or, the intellect, to converse with.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A phone call should be a convenience to the caller, not an inconvenience to the called.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When you decide to meet—in person—someone that you met online, would you then be taking your relationship to the 'previous' level?
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The civilized man is technologically ahead of — intellectually behind — his time.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Being forever available to the rest of the world is overrated. I mean, what are 'missed calls' invented for?
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The longer a person's twitter @username is, the harder it is to argue with them … on twitter.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Those who find it hypocritical of others to use, say, a smartphone, to speak ill of capitalism, needs to be reminded that capitalism is an ideology, not a technology.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You cannot sensibly expect a starving 'God-fearing' man to honor the 8th commandment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Civilization is the commercialization of survival.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
12% of dreams create jobs. 88% of jobs destroy dreams.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Let your work show off for you and not your ego.
Unarine Ramaru
If you value your relationship or friendship, your ego won't stand in the way of a meaningful apology.
Unarine Ramaru
I do not want to be like a small animal bitten by a snake, going stiff with that poison. I want to bite back.
Yvette Christiansë
My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.
Elon Musk
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
Nelson Mandela
It always seems impossible until it's done.
Nelson Mandela
I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.
Nelson Mandela
After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.
Nelson Mandela
He who frowns when they say that he sucks shouldn’t smile when they say that he rocks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A model’s opinion seldom matters. The only time that he is required to open his mouth is when he is required to smile at the camera.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Keep smiling for your day will become a smile.
Gerhard Ebersohn
We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear.
Nelson Mandela
I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.
J.M. Coetzee
Difficult times do not produce gentility, as if there is an angle hovering over the world of the oppressed.
Jonny Steinberg
He thought how easy it would be to write an entire book on Johannesburg violence. The strike leader Pickaxe Mary, after whom Mary Fitzgerald Square was named, who attacked her enemies with a pickaxe handle. The trenches dug into the streets of Fordsburg during the 1922 miners’ strike. The cannons of the government aimed at the poor whites of Vrededorp. The murdered woman in the 1960s whose head was found in the Zoo Lake and whose torso was discovered in a suitcase in Wemmer Pan. Jan Smuts, who wanted to bomb striking workers with aeroplanes. The countless schoolchildren shot during the 1976 uprising. The fifty-three supporters who were shot down in the street outside Shell House, the ANC headquarters. The huge bomb that went off shortly before the first democratic election and made a whole row of shops kneel down on the pavements of Bree Street. The commuters, in the early 1990s, killed by pangas or who jumped to their deaths from moving trains to escape their Portuguese-speaking attackers. The murderess Daisy de Melker, whose third husband survived only because she was caught in time. The violent home invasions, rapes and hijackings he read about in the newspapers every day.
Harry Kalmer
Pray more often and read and obey The Holy Scriptures in The Holy Bible.
Errol Anthony Smythe
The root of all virtue and grace, of all faith and acceptable worship, is that we know that we have nothing but what we receive, and bow in deepest humility to wait upon God for it.
Andrew Murray
Between Monday and Saturday men make an audience. On Sunday, they make a congregation.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
This [egalitarianism vs complementarianism] is not an issue of chauvinism or discrimination. It is an issue of Biblical interpretation.
Alan de Jager
I walk into so many places where Christians are gathered and I get all excited, only to find that the fellowship among these Believers is dead! There is no openness, no authenticity.
Alan de Jager
Going to the extreme of inviting and welcoming people into your church in order to hear you condemn them or to know from your policy that you condemn them is not much better than bullying.
Christina Engela
If we're going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of "Little Jesuses" to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God.
Alan Hirsch
A prisoner is imprisoned by the crime that he has committed. A jailer is imprisoned — in the very same prison — by the employment contract that he has signed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The one ring, to rule them all’? Sounds very far-fetched to me!
Graham Downs
Science gave us forensics. Law gave us crime.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.
Jonny Steinberg
Constable N stepped away from the car, into the darkness where Darren could not see where his gun was pointing, and fired two rounds into the air. The gunshots cracked the roof of the night sky and echoed back at us. My first thought was that they could be heard all over Toekomsrus; I wondered how many imaginations had in that instant conjured a different story to explain the gunshots; a record of all those stories, I found myself thinking, would probably document every fear this place has of itself and its young men.
Jonny Steinberg
About a year ago, an entire suburb in this man’s jurisdiction turned from the police and erected a substitute agency. To all intents and purposes, several thousand people here have severed their relationship with the South African Police Service. He appears not to have noticed.
Jonny Steinberg
Crime must be brought under control... Freedom without civility, freedom without the ability to live in peace, was not true freedom at all.
Nelson Mandela
It was a mild winter’s evening in ‘Japp’s Saloon and Speakeasy’, in the northwest corner of the only legal red-light area of the city. (The S.O.D.s believed in crime management.) Timaset Skooch leaned back in the aluminum framed chair, checking his cards carefully while wearing his best poker face. Across the table from him sat Jonn Deire, a large man who was trying very hard to out-poker face him and who didn’t enjoy jokes about his name much.
Christina Engela
He saved me in so many ways. I didn't see it at first. He saved me from certain death. He's the scariest person I've ever met, but for some reason I felt safe with him. Now I'm just a fading star amongst all the bright ones...All I want is love and all I get is people trying to kill me and take away what peace I manage to find in between.
Michelle Horst
In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people.
Trevor Noah
Greatness is unleashed when you develop faith in the power of your faith.
Phumi Ngwane
It's the not-yet in the now, the taste of the fruit that does not-yet exist, hanging the blossom on the bough.
Laurens van der Post
Life’s most rewarding forms of being: Being patient, and, being yourself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I spoke of an Army on the point of entering an enemy's territories. Answering the question as to the cause of delay: 'Waiting for supplies.' The answer might also have been: 'Waiting for instructions, 'Waiting for orders.' If the last dispatch had not been received, with the final orders of the commander in chief, the army dared not move. Even so in the Christian life - as deep as the need of waiting for supplies is that of waiting for instructions.
Andrew Murray
Some people are so boring that you are more bored when you are with them … than when you are alone.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
Nadine Gordimer
It is necessary to understand that the next person is just as important as you are on this earth. So no one should undermine others based on their current circumstances.
Gugu Mona
If everyone was cognisant of their purpose on earth, we would only need weapons for hunting and nothing else.
Gugu Mona
Mykl d’Angelo groaned where he sat slumped in his chair. The irritating noise was unsettling his pet dog lying on his lap. The wickerwork garden chair creaked pleasantly under him and some native Earth birds made pleasant sounds above while the cool wind wafted over him as he lazily …
Christina Engela
No matter how rich you can ever be! The greatest wealth is in loving yourself and fulfilling your God-Given purpose on earth.
Gift Gugu Mona
Water is becoming a very scarce resource on a daily basis. Therefore, we need to teach communities to preserve it since we can't afford to live without water.
Gugu Mona