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"The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world."
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"Most peoples are prisoners of other people's thoughts."
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Personal Development
"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."
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Personal Development
"Women who don't like the rules change the rules."
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Personal Development
"People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Probably the people on the street know better than the people at home."
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Personal Development
"In a materialistic society, the dead body of a rich man's dog is regarded as a corpse; that of a poor man, a carcass."
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Personal Development
"People on corporate conveyor belts, like animals in slaughter-chutes are all part of the same big massacre of joy."
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Personal Development
"Poverty is like a crumb that sits at a table, and starves itself to death."
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Personal Development
"The action or inaction of any government does not negate the Personal Responsibility of the citizens."
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Personal Development
"If you have any hate in your heart, you will not be able to create a society that is just."
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Personal Development
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"What we have, we all must lose-that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth-nothing more."
Life
"There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride."
Emotion
"She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating."
Forgiveness
"Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it."
Morality
"To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way."
Culture
"Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else."
Awareness
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."
Observation
"The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world."
Society
"How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?"
Listening
"Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was."
Psychology
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