Nelson Mandela: 10 quotes on his birthday

All across the globe today, politicians and ordinary citizens alike are paying tribute to former South African president and freedom fighter Nelson Mandela on his 95th birthday. In the US Congress, Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, "By keeping his humility and his faith, Mandela became a better man and has made us better too." Here, to celebrate Mandela, are 10 of his more memorable quotes.

1. Celebration

"Today we are entering a new era for or country and its people. Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa."

– Inauguration speech given in CapeTown, 1994

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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