John Carlin · 288 pages
Rating: (3.5K votes)
“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
“You come up and read books?” asked Gregor. “Read them, eat them, whatever mood strikes me,”
― Suzanne Collins, quote from Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane
“bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“O may it come, the time of love,
The time we'd be enamoured of.
- Song of the Highest Tower”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“But William Dilworth English, M.D., was not thinking of the immediate punishment of his son; that was something which could be decided upon. He was not thinking of the glory of having a son who hopped freight trains. The thing that put him in the deep mood and gave him the heavy look that Julian saw on his face was that 'chip off the old block' refrain of Butch Doerflinger’s. William Dilworth English was thinking of his own life, the scrupulous, notebook honesty; the penny-watching, bill-paying, self-sacrificing honesty that had been his religion after his own father’s suicide. And that was his reward: a son who turned out to be like his grandfather, a thief.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
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