Quotes from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has...It is more powerful in govenments in breaking down racial barriers.”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

“Your freedom and mine cannot be seperated”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

“Should a black woman carrying her "madam's" white baby travel in the "whites only" or the "nonwhites" section of the train? Or would a Japanese visitor who used a "whites only" public toilet be breaking the law? Or what was a bus conductor to do when he ordered a brown-skinned passanger to get off a whites-only bus and the passanger refused, insisting that he was a white man with a deep suntan?”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

“Most important of all, Mandela stated that the way to a negotiated solution lay in a simple-sounding formula: reconciling white fears with black aspirations.”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

“Having won over his own people—in itself no mean feat, for they were a disparate bunch, drawn from all manner of creeds, colors, and tribes—he then went out and won over the enemy.”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

“This was the moment when I understood more clearly than ever before that the liberation struggle of our people was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage,” Sexwale said, picking up on the core lesson he had learned from Mandela in prison, “but more so, it was about liberating white people from fear. And there it was. ‘Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!’ Fear melting away.”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

“I meant “tribalism” in the widest sense of the word, as applied to race, religion, nationalism, or politics. George Orwell defined it as that “habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad.”
― John Carlin, quote from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

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“أليس من سخرية القدر أن يفصل الجهلة فى القضايا السياسية الخطيرة مثلا لتضيع اراء الصفوة فى زحمة الثرثرة والصراخ ؟. أليس من العار أن تترك مقدرات أمة تحت رحمة مواطنين يتصرفون بهذه المقدرات بخفة ومجون كما لو كانو يلعبون الورق؟؟؟”
― Adolf Hitler, quote from Mein Kampf

“His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn't have any soul and left for the brothel.

He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to evil. The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest - they said they took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted, and poisoning him - and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again. He had all the time he could want to study his soul in and assure himself that it was not there. When he was thoroughly convinced, he saw that this was something that he had always known.”
― Flannery O'Connor, quote from Wise Blood

“The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. ”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Don't condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water, just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won't have to say that yours is better."
-said by Elijah Muhammad to Malcolm X”
― Malcolm X, quote from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome—a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.”
― Paul Kalanithi, quote from When Breath Becomes Air

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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