Thabo Mbeki Quotes

That surely must be a concern to anyone who decides this drug must be given to stop transmissions, again from mother to child, which is extremely costly and must be taken into account.

Pope Benedict XVI assumes leadership at a critical time in which the world's collective wisdom and leadership including that of the religious community is most important to face up to challenges of deepening poverty and under-development afflicting many people of the world.

I am sure it is in the medical textbooks, there are many things that cause immune deficiency and you will find therefore in the South African HIV and AIDS programme, that it will say that part of what we have got to do is to make sure that our health infrastructure, our health system is able to deal adequately with all of the illnesses that are a consequence of AIDS.

We will continue to count on your unwavering support and commitment to working with leaders of our continent in bringing about the desired renaissance of Africa.

If you sit in a position where decisions that you take would have a serious effect on people, you can't ignore a lot of experience around the world which says this drug has these negative effects.

We do not accept that human society should be constructed on the basis of a savage principle of the survival of the fittest

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew. To say you've got to inquire, you've got to be testing your knowledge all the time in order to be more effective in what you're doing.

None dare challenge me when i say i am an Afrikan.

We've had a long wrangle with the pharmaceutical industry about parallel imports, and what we were saying is we want to make medicines and drugs as affordable as a possible to what is largely a poor population.

As Africans, we need to share common recognition that all of us stand to lose if we fail to transform our continent.

When will the day come that our dignity will be fully restored, when the purpose of our lives will no longer be merely to survive until the sun rises tomorrow!

How many murders are committed in Gauteng, or in the Western Cape, in a month? A week? A day? An hour? But of course we are not allowed to know for sure. In close and direct imitation of his apartheid models, Selebi ensures that no statistics about crime may be published regularly in the press.

The people of Zimbabwe have a responsibility to ensure that the government that they elected behaves properly.

I am sure it would not be in the long-term interest of China, which would continue to depend on these African resources for a very long time, to see the emergence of any sense of hostility, animosity, tension between itself and the African continent.

We are not being arrogant or complacent when we are said that our country, as a united nation, has never in its entire history, enjoyed such a confluence of encouraging possibilities.

You cannot just depend on the market, because the market will say: China needs oil; China needs coal; China needs whatever, and Africa has got all these things in abundance. And we go there and get them, and the more we develop the Chinese economy, the larger the manufacturing is, the more we need global markets - sell it to the Africans which indeed might very well destroy whatever infant industries are trying to develop on the continent. That is what the market would do.

It is difficult to discuss history, and more difficult to talk about now, today, even simple things.

In Africa you have space ... there a profound sense of space here, space and sky

South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

I say that why don't we bring all points of view. Sit around a table and discuss this evidence, and produce evidence as it may be, and let's see what the outcome is, which is why we are having this International panel which we are all talking about.

It's very worrying at this time in the world that any point of view should be prohibited, that's banned, there are heretics that should be burned at the stake.

Gloom and despondency have never defeated adversity. Trying times need courage and resilience. Our strength as a people is not tested during the best of times,

Those who oppressed us described us as the Dark Continent!

I don't imagine Heads of Government would ever be able to say I'm not an economist therefore I can't take decisions on matters of the economy; I'm not a soldier I can't take decisions on matters of defence; I'm not an educationist so I can't take decisions about education.

As a consequence of the victories we have registered during our first ten years of freedom, we have laid a firm foundation for the new advances we must and will make during the next decade.

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.

Science is always inquiring.

Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!

The issue of racism and racial prejudice is very, very difficult to discuss. It is difficult to discuss the history of apartheid - many people have made the observation that it is very, very difficult to find anybody in South Africa who ever supported apartheid: because everybody was opposed to that; it was against our will and so on.

If we only said safe sex, use a condom, we won't stop the spread of AIDS in this country.

I know there is a lot of concern about plans that Iran might have to develop nuclear weapons which arises from positions that Iran took in the past when in fact it did not disclose things to the IAEA. And therefore the conclusion that the reason that they are refusing to do it is because they are hiding something - I can understand that.

I get a sense that we've all been educated into one school of thought. I'm not surprised at all to find among the overwhelming majority of scientists, are people who would hold one particular view because that's all they're exposed to.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

The reports from the scientific world are that there is a very severe and escalating impact of HIV and AIDS in South Africa, and from what I have read, it is assuming particular, distinct characteristics, which, for instance, were atypical of how this phenomenon had developed in the States. This meant that we must look at what it is that results in all of this, specific to our country.

I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

Your medical documents will say: acquired immune deficiency syndrome, that is AIDS, which means that you have got this challenge of immune deficiency. All right, what causes immune deficiency? HIV? All right, is that all that causes immune deficiency? And your medical textbooks would say no, there are other things that will cause acquired immune deficiency. There is also a genetic immune deficiency, a different phenomenon.

Our experience over the last 20 years has shown that indeed people must themselves become their own liberators. You cannot wait for somebody else to come and rescue you.

The King had been a good friend of the government and the people of South Africa and we all mourn his passing with our brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia.

As we mourn President Mandela's passing we must ask ourselves the fundamental question - what shall we do to respond to the tasks of building a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa, a people-centred society free of hunger, poverty, disease and inequality, as well as Africa's renaissance, to whose attainment President Nelson Mandela dedicated his whole life?

It wouldn't sit easily on one's conscience that you had been warned and there could be danger, but nevertheless you went ahead and said let's dispense these drugs.

South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.