Quotes by South African Authors - Page 37

Beauty... Is what you are after a lifetime of struggle in the face of hostility, surviving, and standing scarred and unafraid, triumphant before your enemies.
Christina Engela
No matter how bitter the truth is, the beauty is that it liberates.
Gift Gugu Mona
Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
J.M. Coetzee
I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I'm hurting. But isn't that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
Tarryn Fisher
The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to—instead of them—change reality.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dear young aspiring leader, one day you will be in a position of power. That shouldn't let you enslave nor look down upon others, but aim to influence change for the benefit of future generations.
Gugu Mona
When you allow God to change your heart, He will also change your story.
Gugu Mona
Since we aim for a healthy life for all, we should teach young girls that their worth can't be validated by dating older rich men, because that is risky for their health. Until we change certain perceptions in society, we will keep fighting the same battles.
Gift Gugu Mona
The beauty of being alive is that each day you are given another chance to correct what you did wrong and improve on what you can do right.
Gift Gugu Mona
Poverty should first be addressed in the mind because even if you give millions to a poor person, until there's a change of mindset, they will still remain the same.
Gift Gugu Mona
In order to validate our Africanness, we hold on to tradition at all cost, banning critical engagement in an attempt to preserve its sacredness
Malebo Sephodi
The fact that you are alive is what matters most because no matter what your situation is, you still have a chance to change it.
Gift Gugu Mona
Anger and animosity cannot enshrine what was once wonderful...
Mala Naidoo
People who complain about something that they cannot do anything about are as irritating as those who complain about something that they can do something about.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.
Bryce Courtenay
Most sexually adventurous women want a man who regards cunnilingus as a basic woman right.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some women would not cheat, and some would not have cheated, had they each married a man whom they love … or at least like.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Working with women is such a rewarding experience because as you interact with them, you realize that although they face various struggles, women have one goal, to see the world change for the better.
Gugu Mona
The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'?
Christina Engela
I can understand backward patriarchal reasoning coming from a male, but from a woman - and of all people, a leader of women? It says something profound about leadership - and, if anything - what it says about followers is not very flattering at all.
Christina Engela
Right now though, there is little that concerns me more than the impending assault on the human rights and equality of women and the pink community in South Africa. Right now there are events afoot in this country which justify my concern.
Christina Engela
It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.
Trevor Noah
Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him—not women in their right senses. They inspected him, maybe they even tried him our. Then they moved on.
J.M. Coetzee
Never let anything be a setback in your life, not even your thoughts, words nor actions.
Gugu Mona
Life comes once, live wisely.
Gift Gugu Mona
And It was said to me: "embrace the glorious mess you are". How easy it is to see darkness in the winter shedding and not see that even in its gloominess lies great beauty. That even in our great struggles - lies within a great victory. How then does the Spring green come about without the fertilisation of the Winter brown? Isn't it the very brown that gives way and life to the green we await to goggle in awe. There is power and sheer beauty in your mess. A true triumphing chaos that renders sweet melodic honey to your journey. So again it was whispered to me "embrace the glorious mess that you are
Malebo Sephodi
Republicans are the drag queens of politics. Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either neoconservative welfare-warfare statists or global social democrats ...
Ilana Mercer
To Donal Trump, making America great means making the people great. To the political cast, conversely, making America great means making government great.
Ilana Mercer
To Donald Trump, making America great means making the people great. To the political cast, conversely, making America great means making government great.
Ilana Mercer
Is human dignity and human life so cheap that the rights protecting it can be traded away to appease the appetite for intimidation and prejudice of a vicious and self-centered group - for whatever reason, power, politics, nationalism, or unity?
Christina Engela
It seems to me that wherever religion and politics mix in one body, fascist values - and not 'family values' - rear their ugly head.
Christina Engela
If you 'don't do politics' , trust me - politics will do you.
Christina Engela
If you 'don't do politics', trust me - politics will do you.
Christina Engela
Under Capitalism the most important thing is to squeeze out more and more money for a few people to spend. This means that most of the other people -- as well as the earth and the sea and all the creatures and plants and goggas -- have to pay the price.
Sally Andrew
Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees.
Mark Gevisser
Here was a temporary solution. Parole would get Mofokeng and Mokoena out of jail as quickly as possible. Other details could be sorted out later. I accompanied Nyambi to Kroonstad jail at the end of October and remember that as he told Mofokeng and Mokoena the news—that they would be home for Christmas—smiles slowly but surely transformed the sombre, cautious expressions on their faces.Big problem: it was discovered in December, a full two months after the judgment was made, that the court order does not mention the NCCS at all. Consequently, the NCCS interpreted the court's order as having removed the NCCS's jurisdiction to deal with any "lifers" sentenced pre-1994. The members of the NCCS packed their briefcases and went home.No one knows why the judgment didn't mention the NCCS; maybe the judge who wrote it, Justice Bess Nkabinde, simply didn't know how the parole system operates; but eight of her fellow judges, the best in the land, found with her.The Mofokeng and Mokoena families, who are from 'the poorest of the poor', as the ANC likes to say, are distraught.But the rest—the law men, the politicians and the government ministers—well, quite frankly, they don't seem to give a fig. Zuma has gone on holiday, to host his famous annual Christmas party for children. Mapisa-Nqakula has also gone on holiday. Mofokeng and Mokoena remain where they were put 17 years ago, despite not having committed any crime.
Jeremy Gordin
This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, 'When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.' But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. It is about good governance, and this is a universal value, as relevant to an African village as it is to Westminster. If you are unable to keep your appetites in check, you are inevitably going to live beyond your means. And this means you are going to become vulnerable to patronage and even corruption. That is why Jacob Zuma's 'polygamy' is his achilles heel.
Mark Gevisser
if Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judea, a big operator. It was because he was indifferent to politics, and made his indifference clear, that he was liquidated. How to live one's life outside politics, and one's death too: that was the example he set for his followers.
J.M. Coetzee
I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irritant. With both Malema and the vuvuzela, their importance is far overstated. Malema: South Africa's Robert Mugabe? I think not. The vuvuzela: an archetypal symbol of 'African culture?' For African civilisation's sake, I seriously hope not.Both are getting far too much airtime than they deserve. Both have thrust themselves on to the world stage through a combination of hot air and raucous bluster. Both amuse and enervate in roughly equal measure. And both are equally harmless in and of themselves — though in Malema's case, it is the political tendency that he represents, and the right-wing interests that lie behind his diatribes that is dangerous. With the vuvu I doubt if there are such nefarious interests behind the scenes; it may upset the delicate ears of the middle classes, both here and at the BBC, but I suspect that South Africa's democracy will not be imperilled by a mass-produced plastic horn.
Richard Calland
My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity especially on the situation in Gaza shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma
Desmond Tutu
Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state certification. The state pursues the certification of death with extraordinary thoroughness—witness the dispatch of a host of forensic scientists and bureaucrats to scrutinize and photograph and prod and poke the mountain of human corpses left behind by the great tsunami of December 2004 in order to establish their individual identities. No expense is spared to ensure that the census of subjects shall be complete and accurate.Whether the citizen lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead.
J.M. Coetzee
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. -Nelson Mandela, activist, South African president, Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1918)
Nelson Mandela
The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A deep breath is a technique with which we minimize the number of instances where we say what we do not mean … or what we really think.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Our parents would not be ‘The best parents in the world’ (to us) if they were not our parents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is a sign of immaturity to believe that being older than someone (automatically) makes you more (mentally) mature than them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Stolen oranges also have Vitamin C. Likewise, a stolen salmon, too, has omega-3 fatty acids.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some mistakes are worse than others: wearing your underwear inside out isn’t as uncomfortable as wearing it back to front.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Every single living thing is food to at least one living thing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You cannot really shame a man who sincerely does not care what others think of him.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thanks to photography, some memories overstay their welcome.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana