Alan Paton quotes

Alan Paton was a South African writer and anti-apartheid activist, best known for his novel "Cry, the Beloved Country." His works addressed issues of racial injustice and social reform in South Africa. He remains an influential figure in literature and the fight for equality. Here are 22 of his quotes:

There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.

Alan Paton

But the one thing that has power completely is love, because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power.

Alan Paton

I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.

Alan Paton

Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.

Alan Paton

The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again.

Alan Paton

I envision someday a great, peaceful South Africa in which the world will take pride, a nation in which each of many different groups will be making its own creative contribution.

Alan Paton

Happy the eyes that can close.

Alan Paton

The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.

Alan Paton

The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.

Alan Paton

because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.

Alan Paton

Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering.

Alan Paton

Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

Alan Paton

I have always found that actively loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society.

Alan Paton

We had two masters of the spoken word in South Africa, General Smuts and his lieutenant J. H. Hofmeyr, whose life I wrote. Smuts spoke in a high-pitched voice, not the kind of voice that one would expect from a famous soldier, but he too could hold an audience in the hollow of his hand, partly because he was Smuts, partly because he could say nothing trite or shallow, partly because he knew how to speak to ordinary men and women.

Alan Paton

To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.

Alan Paton

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?

Alan Paton

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply... For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

Alan Paton

God forgives us... who am I not to forgive?

Alan Paton

You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right.

Alan Paton