My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy… and I believed that I didn’t have really a function as an artist, as a useful artist, in that anymore.

As a young woman, I attended Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was then not segregated. But I witnessed the weight of Apartheid everywhere around me.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

Apartheid cannot be reformed, it has to be eliminated.

Apartheid isn’t that cut-and-dry. All men are not created equal.

The people who are opposing the policy of apartheid have not the courage of their convictions. They do not marry non-Europeans.

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

I try not to get too political. But coming from South Africa, where apartheid was a huge problem, and there was lots of inequality, has shaped me in terms of how I view certain issues.

Very sad to hear about the passing of Nelson Mandela. He was a true inspiration for human rights and equality for South Africa and the reason apartheid no longer exists there. The world will never forget his capacity for forgiveness and magnanimity. RIP

We have got to move away from the concept of race and color because that is what apartheid is. We cannot end apartheid if we retain these concepts.

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.

Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can’t do anything about that.

I was involved with the anti-apartheid movement through my work as an artist and also through my political commitment.

Harriet Washington, in ‘Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,’ documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.

The sanctions will not kill us. It’s apartheid that’s killing us.

If we don’t move forward with regard to creating a non-racial society in South Africa and we allow this legacy of apartheid to persist, these divisions between black and white in wealth and income and so on, in the future you would indeed have an ugly upheaval.

Jews and Muslims ‘dialoguing’ has nothing to do with Palestine. The problem is settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation, not religion.

People don’t know that there were very successful black businessmen in the years of apartheid.

Apartheid is inherently a practice of violence.

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

The fact that apartheid has been tied up with white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and deliberate oppression makes the problem much more complex. Material want is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Protest theater has a place again. It’s not against whites or apartheid. It is against injustice and anything that fails our people.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? It’s an interesting question that has generated insightful commentary over the past few months, with the best answers situating Trumpian illiberalism within America’s long history of racial oppression, slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the ongoing backlash to the loss of white privilege.

America’s view of apartheid is simple and straightforward: We believe it is wrong. We condemn it. And we are united in hoping for the day when apartheid will be no more.

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

I grew up during apartheid; there was never a day in South Africa that was just great. I love that I’ve had success as an actor and producer, but I know the thing my children will know most about is the work I’ve done with HIV. Success in life is all about humanity.

Now, myself, I’m not a pacifist at all. I believe in just war. I would have joined the spirit of the nation to fight against apartheid.

We had to forge an alliance of strength based not on colour but on commitment to the total abolition of apartheid and oppression; we would seek allies, of whatever colour, as long as they were totally agreed on our liberation aims.

There must be an end to white monopoly on political power, and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratized.

What the apartheid system was really good at doing was convincing groups to hate one another.

I was 15 years old when I first heard the name Mandela, or Madiba, as he is fondly known in Africa. In apartheid South Africa he was public enemy number one. Shrouded in secrecy, myth and rumour, the media called him ‘The Black Pimpernel’.

To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of huger and deprivation is to dehumanize them. But such has been the terrible fate of all black persons in our country under the system of apartheid.

In 1985, I joined my mother in a protest against apartheid in which we were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. And she was at President-elect Mandela’s side in Johannesburg when he claimed victory in South Africa’s first free elections.

I have made the most profound apology in front of the Truth Commission and on other occasions about the injustices which were wrought by apartheid.

You build dreams, you build castles in the air, and you hope that at least part of that will be realized, even under apartheid.

We are determined that expropriation without compensation should be implemented in a way that increases agricultural production, improves food security, and ensure that land is returned to those from who it was taken under colonialism and apartheid.

Criminality is always the result of poverty.

Love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

People in apartheid South Africa can tell you that God cursed black people when they cursed Him. And so the hermetic people were condemned to be drawers of water and of wood.

The deep inequalities that persist are visible reminders of the effects of apartheid and colonialism. Until these scars are healed, the vision of our Constitution will not have been achieved.

No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It’s not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side.

I am sick and tired of the hollow parrot-cry of “Apartheid!” I’ve said many times that the word “Apartheid” means good neighbourliness.

Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.

We used to say to the apartheid government: you may have the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come: join the winning side. His Holiness and the Tibetan people are on the winning side.

I am inspired by Nelson Mandela. I was a volunteer teacher in South Africa during apartheid, where I witnessed his success liberating black South Africans.

I played an integral part in helpings formulating that new vision… that we must abandon apartheid and accept one united South Africa with equal rights for all, with all forms of discrimination to be scrapped from the statute book.

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

We’re building what I call ‘software apartheid.’ We’re in the process of creating a divided society: those who can use technology on one side, and those who can’t on the other. And it happens to divide neatly along economic lines.

I’ve spent a lot of time in L.A., it’s always reminded me a bit of Jo’burg, which is a deeply segregated city. And L.A. is really like an apartheid city; white people just don’t go to South Central. It’s just a different world.

I stand here before you not as a prophet, but as a humble servant of you, the people.

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks‘ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!

We cannot have policies that punish people for taking action. Imagine the further harm it would have caused if the federal government banned civil rights leaders from boycotting buses in Montgomery, Alabama, or banning divestment from Apartheid South Africa.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

Lethal Weapon 2 used the platform to talk about the apartheid system. That was a very important moment for us.

I’m fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

The question of Israeli apartheid was anathema a decade ago. Now it’s even talked about by top Israeli officials, who say – they differ on the timing: We say it’s already there; they say that if we don’t do something different, we’re going to face apartheid.

I grew up under Thatcher; the era of apartheid; the era of the poll tax; the era of riots. I remember Neil Kinnock was a hero.

Our involvement in the civil rights movement is what sent us into our involvement against apartheid.

If this be the Messiah, then I do not wish to see his coming

Apartheid is a lie, people can work together, people can create together.

Whether ‘Avatar‘ is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it’s undeniable that the film – like alien apartheid flick ‘District 9′, released earlier this year – is emphatically a fantasy about race.

The majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organization and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy.

With the Cuban presence in Namibia it was possible to achieve the security and real freedom of that country and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, with the modest contribution of the international military presence in Africa.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.

South Africans have no concept of time and this is also why we can’t solve poverty and social problems… It’s now 10 years since the fall of the Apartheid government and we cannot blame Apartheid for being tardy.

The reason I joined the struggle against Apartheid was because you had this system of oppression, which affected everybody who was black. Whether you were old or young, man or woman, in a village or a town, it didn’t matter.

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They’ve been given directorships in every major company. They’re billionaires!

I went on safari in South Africa just after apartheid had ended.

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians…

There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well – the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.

I’m not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of “just war” that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that’s the last, last resort.

We don’t want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can’t improve something that is intrinsically evil.

In my many trips to South Africa, I have met and spoken to a lot of people there, and they all seem to find apartheid as repellent as you would.

The history of apartheid-era South Africa is incredibly sad and at times infuriatingly incomprehensible.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

Mr. Chairman, when I contemplate the evils of apartheid, my heart bleeds and I am sure the heart of every true blooded African bleeds.

We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.

When I was growing up, it was still during Apartheid, so the country was very shielded from the outside artistic world. Anything that was too subversive was basically banned. All the music that we got from outside of South Africa was the poppiest, least subversive music that you could get.

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don’t see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, ‘It’s just a cultural thing’? I don’t think so. I would hope not.

The apartheid people were actors, and they had to act out their part in their beliefs every day. That’s why we always saw them as being comedic.

Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.

HEAVEN: The big apartheid in the sky.

I lost contact with my father for many years because of apartheid. For, like, six years, I didn’t see my dad. And, now, this was the six years of being a teenager.

Apartheid – both petty and grand – is obviously evil.

With the end of the cold war, all the ‘isms‘ of the 20th century – Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism – have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.

I led the fight here against apartheid as President of the ACTU, including particularly the Springbok tour in 1971. And that led to the banning of the South African cricket tour which had been scheduled – that was something that I sorted out with Sir Donald Bradman. That was interesting.

We should have sent the apartheid monsters to jail, not let them off with an amnesty.

I told my cellmates about the oppression of the whites and apartheid. I helped organize hunger strikes and the like in my prison.

The U.S. is the last country that should see itself as an ally of the apartheid system.

Economic, social, and other kinds of regional cooperation are not possible so long as there is apartheid. Therefore, it seems the duty of all mankind to destroy it.

We want Nelson Mandela and the people of South Africa to know that we will stand shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, until apartheid is eradicated.

I don’t want to talk about apartheid… I’m going to South Africa to play tennis and to see the country. That’s as far as it goes.

They don’t stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery.

I’ve been offered jobs by companies that supported apartheid many times in the 25 years of my modeling career, but I have never taken one of them. I have to refuse that money, because I’m not going to work against my people. They’ve suffered enough.

With freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk has not ended yet.

In South Africa in 1987, apartheid was still going strong. Some of the most brutal race laws had been relaxed, but they hadn’t yet been repealed. There was still a lot of tension.

I don’t care if it’s Saudi Arabia or if it’s Israel or any other country. I can’t imagine our members of Congress or even the residents back in the day that pushed back against apartheid in Africa not to be able to boycott.

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I’ve always had the advantage of alienation.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

Arab society features apartheid of women, apartheid of homosexuals, and apartheid of Christians, Jews, and democracy.

How do you deal with a criminal that will not listen to what you have to say and who continues his policy of violence? Some say you continue to talk and let him tire himself out. But nearly 40 years after the institution of apartheid, is there anyone who still believes that verbal persuasion will work?

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

But I think I’m on track to do something even bigger. I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

“We seem to have thought of everything – except the Arabs”

If I were able to write, I probably would. But movies have given me a part of my life where I can express feelings and bring convictions to an audience as if I could write. So I made ‘Gandhi‘ about human relations, prejudice and the empire. In ‘Cry Freedom’ I expressed my horror and disgust about apartheid.

The issue of racism and racial prejudice. It is very, very difficult to discuss. It is difficult to discuss the issue of apartheid. Many have made the observation that it is very difficult to find anyone in SA who ever supported apartheid because everyone was opposed, it was against our will and so on.

A lot of people say colonialism was ‘evil’ or whatever, but what have they really done with Africa since we gave it back to them? I don’t think it should be considered ‘racist’ to admit maybe ending apartheid did more harm than good in South Africa.

Before 1994, many South Africans used theater as a voice of protest against the government. But with the end of apartheid, like the artists who watched the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe, theater had to find new voices and search for new issues.

apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism.

Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great, you can be that generation

There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there’s poverty; there’s political repression; there’s gender apartheid – there’s a sense of culture loss; there’s religious fanaticism.

Martin Luther King Jr’s agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.

Israel is much worse than the original apartheid state.

Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa.

He [Belafonte] was a good teacher and looked after me. He said, ‘You have such great talent, you must try not to be a tornado – be like a submarine. It was good advice when I found myself speaking at the UN Committee Against Apartheid and then the UN General Assembly.

Apartheid – both petty and grand – is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.

I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother’s a black woman, South African Xhosa woman… and my father’s Swiss, from Switzerland.

In America we talk about South Africa, but I tell people that apartheid is nothing compared to what is happening in my country where black oppresses black.

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt – in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure – to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.

No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.

I didn’t actually realise what apartheid meant. I’m probably a bit naive, but I thought it was more of a vague segregation, like on the beaches and buses.

Together we have travelled a long road to be where we are today. This has been a road of struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression.

The very point of Labor‘s Zionist program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!

It may be that apartheid brings such stupendous economic advantages to countries that they would sooner have apartheid than permit its destruction.

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

When [Nelson Mandela] was in prison I admired him for his moral strength… Of his period in power I can see few results. Apartheid no longer exists, at least to all appearances, but no one understands what the new government in South Africa is doing.

During the worst days of apartheid, we turned to the church for hope and courage as we fought a righteous struggle for a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist, just, and prosperous South Africa.

‘District 9‘ was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and ‘Elysium‘ is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.

Imagine if your kids had to carry a ladder to climb an apartheid wall to get to school everyday.

Poverty is not natural; it is man-made

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

One can’t erase the tremendous burden of apartheid in 10 years, 20 years, I believe, even 30 years.

Racism is a blight on the human conscience. The idea that any people can be inferior to another, to the point where those who consider themselves superior define and treat the rest as subhuman, denies the humanity even of those who elevate themselves to the status of gods.

Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.

I listen a lot to the incredible young artists who are coming through, which is something that just wasn’t possible during Apartheid. That’s the way I learn.

As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Apartheid didn’t impinge on music. It impinged on people’s freedoms.