Quotes

...it's having, a belief that we can make a difference. We can do things, our lives can be meaningful, that it’s wonderful to be curious. Curious about the world, to be imaginative, and having hope. You can’t force yourself to have hope. You can’t drink it from a bottle. But if it’s there, to a very large extent, it’s self-fulfilling. It’s a positive kind of take on life that reconnects you with your body, and enables you to get a lot of joy out of simply being alive...

Everything, in my life has been defined in actions - by politics, by struggle, by existence, by resistance. To cut off from all of that is to surrender to a normality that I’ve never had, and that I never really yearned for. It’s to give up the fantasy, the idealism, the imagination, the feeling that there’s a world out there where I can do anything that I want to do. And that imagined world is more real and more profound and more significant than the mundane world that we all live in.

I grew up in a world where my mom’s boss was Moses Kotane, where Pauline Podbrey and HA Naidoo would come and visit. Cissie Gool and Sam Kahn were like Aunty Cissie and Uncle Sam to me. And that just established a normality of people being people but with energy and fun and hope. That was normal. So it wasn’t like some event that I saw that triggered. I just knew from my earliest moments that our whole society was completely wrong. And I was living already in another kind of a world… But I could just see injustice around me everywhere all the time. And so the normal for me was to be anti-racist and this world of segregation of exclusion, of marginalisation, of seeing some people as superior to others was kind of abnormal.

In the beginning and in the end is the word, at least as far as the life of a judge is concerned. We pronounce. We work with words, and we become amongst the most influential story-tellers of our age. How we tell the story is often as important as what we say. The voice we use cannot be that of a depersonalised and divine oracle that declares solutions to the problems of human life through the emanation of pure and detached wisdom. Nor dare we seek to imitate the artificial sound of a computer that has been programmed to produce inexorable outcomes. We speak with the living voices of real protagonists who are immersed in and affected by the very processes we deal with. If law is a machine we are the ghosts that inhabit it and give it life.

Equality means equal concern and respect across difference. It does not presuppose the elimination or suppression of difference. Respect for human rights requires the affirmation of self, not the denial of self. Equality therefore does not imply a levelling or homogenisation of behaviour or extolling one form as supreme, and another as inferior, but acknowledgement and acceptance of difference. At the very least, it affirms that difference should not be the basis for exclusion, marginalisation or stigma. At best, it celebrates the vitality that difference brings to society.

People asked me afterwards, "how come you introduced culture into politics?" It was the other way round. It was culture that actually got me into politics… And now suddenly poetry was life, it was revolution, it was volcanoes. It was love, it was passion, it was the leaves of this native land. I was ready.

What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including the sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world?

What comes through as an innocuous part of daily living to one person who happens to inhabit a particular intellectual and spiritual universe, might be communicated as oppressive and exclusionary to another who lives in a different realm of belief. What may be so trifling in the eyes of members of the majority or a dominant section of the population as to be invisible, may assume quite large proportions and be eminently real, hurtful and oppressive to those upon whom it impacts. This will especially be the case when what is apparently harmless is experienced by members of the affected group as symptomatic of a wide and pervasive pattern of marginalisation and disadvantage.

Health care rights by their very nature have to be considered not only in a traditional legal context structured around the ideas of human autonomy but in a new analytical framework based on the notion of human interdependence.

A healthy life depends upon social interdependence: the quality of air, water, and sanitation which the state maintains for the public good; the quality of one’s caring relationships, which are highly correlated to health; as well as the quality of health care and support furnished officially by medical institutions and provided informally by family, friends, and the community.

To wake up without an arm but to feel joyously alive, to learn to do everything - to sit up, to stand, to walk, to run, to write again. Every little detail became a moment of discovery and breakthrough. I had an absolute conviction that as I got better, my country got better.

Freedom is not some state of exaltation, a condition of instinctive anarchy and joy; it is not sudden and permanent happiness. In fact, some of the freest countries have the most melancholy and stressed people.

We can inherit riches or poverty, power or oppression, but beauty, never. We have to find it in ourselves, generation after generation.

‘Dear Comrade Albie, we will avenge you!’ And I think, ‘Bobby, what do you mean? Are we going to cut off their arms? Blind them in one eye? What kind of country would we be living in? ’ And I say to myself, ‘If we get democracy in South Africa, if we get freedom and equality and justice for everyone, that will be my soft vengeance. Roses and lilies will grow out of my arm.

If you are waiting for the beautiful people, or even a beautiful leader, it won’t happen. It’s always got to be us and the people like us and our neighbours and our parents and our children and grandchildren.... who now have to create that more beautiful society that we long for and still have to achieve.

The best time for fighting for freedom is always now, and the best starting point is always here.

We wanted a Constitution that was smiling to the people – but it mustn’t be a sneer smile, or an insincere mask of a smile. The smile must come from inside, that people may believe in it, because it’s authentic. And the smile contains tears, and sadness, and a knowledge of imperfection.

By their nature, human rights belong to all humanity, not to any single continent. It is true that the term democracy emerged in Greece which, by the way, was an African country, an Asian country and a European country, at the same time.

If there is one thing that the struggle against apartheid has taught us, it is how important it is to manage difference in society. Difference was used as the basis for apartheid. Difference became an instrument of domination and control. What if we can turn difference around to become a source of vitality, of variability, of richness?

Somehow people don’t speak about disability in quite the same way if someone disabled is there; you don’t speak about the disabled, you speak to and with the disabled. Disabled people are seen not as a section apart from the nation, but as an active and constitutive part of the nation.

Conscience is what is in your head, conscience is what you determine for yourself as the most central aspect of your being. And the paradoxical result of that was that fighting for my secular belief system as a young child in an intensely, at least overtly, religious and pious environment, went on to make me extremely respectful of and conscientious towards the consciences of others, including religious beliefs and consciences.

A Constitution is not a product to be sold to the people through skilful advertising. It is something that emerges from our innards, that expresses our highest idealism while protecting us from our basest temptations.