Sentences That Made An Impact

Tim: (1) The only way to make apartheid work, therefore, was to cripple the black mind.

(2) That's what apartheid did: it convinced every group that it was because of the other race that they didn't get into the club."

Goger: Seeing him had reaffirmed his choosing of me. He chose to have me in his life. He chose to answer my letter. I was wanted. Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.

Olav: More than a sentence, what really struck me was page 75, about the different ways in which Chinese and Japanese were treated. It shows just how calculated the whole set-up was, and could lead you to think that apartheid was more based on financial incentive rather than actual hatred of other races.

Sam: While most children are proof of their parents' love, I was the proof of their criminality.

Jay: I don't regret anything I've ever done in life, any choice that I've made. But I'm consumed with regret for the things I didn't do, the choices I didn't make, the things I didn't say. 

We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection, but regret is the thing we should fear most. 

Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. "What if..." "If only..." "I wonder what would have..." You will never never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.

Porter: In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix – and in a lot of cases, want to mix.

Walker: There is something magical about Soweto. Yes, it was a prison designed by our oppressors, but it also gave us a sense of self-determination and control. Soweto was ours. It had an aspirational quality that you don't find elsewhere. In America the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.