Top 66 Apartheid Quotes

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

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

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 Some of the most brutal race laws had been relaxed, but they hadn’t yet been repealed.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.

Apartheid was in South Africa; now it has been transferred to Palestine.

When I was a kid, pre-1994 was still apartheid, so we didn’t get a lot the subversive music from the States or from the U.K. A lot of the music we would get was the poppiest pop music, so I’ve never really had a bad association it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

For most of my writing life, I’ve refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.

Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves – the areas set aside in law for African occupation – as early as 1959 and 1960.

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.

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.

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.

This sympathy is not translated into force against the British government because it is not like the anti- apartheid movement which had a high profile here and Mandela is a more engaging figure than Yasser Arafat.

If apartheid is removed, then the violence that is necessary to maintain it will be removed along with the pressures from apartheid which create a violent response.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

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.

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.

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.

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

Apartheid is inherently a practice of violence.

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!

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

For those who may not know, it was the CBC that put in place the legislation that put sanctions against South Africa to end apartheid, and that took Mandela off the terrorist list.

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have – we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy – must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

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.

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.

The working-class Africans are not doing very well, and one of the problems is their education is so shocking. It is routinely said it is a result of apartheid. Deliberately, black people were not allowed to know too much. They could read and write a bit to be useful, but that’s about it.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

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.

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

The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.

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.

Obama’s not down for the civil rights struggle, and he certainly wasn’t down for the apartheid struggle, but he’s clearly gonna take advantage of it and insert himself in such a way as to make it look like he is single-handedly responsible for apartheid going by the wayside.

Arthur Ashe had been the first black athlete to play Johannesburg at the time of apartheid.

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.

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.

‘A Just Defiance’ has been a huge success in South Africa. While reading at times like a well-written thriller, its significance is to reveal apartheid to have been far more brutal, ruthless, and self-serving even than we had suspected.

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.

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.

Our target is not negotiations, it is the end of the apartheid system. There can be no compromise about that.

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 really have a function as a useful artist in that anymore.

The kids growing up in the apartheid era were so restricted and angry – if they spoke out against it, they were thrown in jail.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think South Africa would be in a lot worse position had you not had visionaries like the Mandelas or the Oliver Tambos or the people there who came together after… both during apartheid and afterwards to create and structure their society.

Whoever says that sanctions will only deteriorate the situations of blacks in South Africa does not know the criminal, murderous character of genocide that represents the system of apartheid.

A ‘township’ in the U.S. is a small area. In South Africa it’s a place designated for non-white people during the apartheid.

When I talk about the end of apartheid, I prefer not to claim the honor that I have ended 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.

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

Yes, I learned history at school; I know everything about apartheid. My dad, he bought the books about it, stuff like that. But I just move on with my life. It’s completely different for me.

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

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

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

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

I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag.

Abhorrence of apartheid is a moral attitude, not a policy.

Those who want to perpetuate apartheid also seek to divert your attention to the false issue of communism, to send the entire American public on a witch hunt.

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 think all of my writing life led up to the writing of ‘The Train Driver’ because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

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.