| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
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| NUMBER: | 37677 |
| QUOTATION: | The years of imprisonment hardened me.... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life, I no longer have the emotion of fear. ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Winnie Mandela (b. 1936), South African black anti–apartheid activist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 6, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989).
Said in a 1987 interview. Approximately one year later, Mandela was charged with complicity in the beating of four young anti-apartheid activists, including a fourteen-year-old boy, Stompie Moeketsi, who died as a result. |
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| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
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