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Success Quote by Nelson Mandela

"If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness"

About this Quote

Mandela frames nation-building as something sturdier than hope and less glamorous than vengeance: not a dream you wait for, but a destination you walk toward. The opening clause concedes the seduction of “dreams” about a “beautiful South Africa” while quietly demoting them to the realm of imagery. Then he pivots to “roads,” a word that drags the reader out of abstraction and into logistics. Roads imply planning, repetition, and the dull courage of showing up tomorrow. They also imply shared infrastructure: you can’t drive a country to a new future on a private path.

Naming two roads “Goodness and Forgiveness” is rhetorically disarming. “Goodness” sounds almost childlike, a moral baseline so plain it’s hard to argue with; that simplicity is the point. Mandela is not offering a partisan program but a civic ethic. “Forgiveness,” in post-apartheid South Africa, is the more charged term: it signals restraint by the formerly oppressed and a conditional invitation to the formerly powerful. The subtext is strategic as much as spiritual. Forgiveness here is not amnesia; it’s an alternative to civil war, a way to metabolize injustice without letting it dictate the future.

The context makes the line bite. Mandela spent 27 years imprisoned by a state built on humiliation and control. When he talks about “roads,” he’s speaking as someone who knows what it costs to keep walking. The sentence sells reconciliation as hard policy: moral language deployed to keep a fragile democracy from tearing itself apart.

Quote Details

TopicForgiveness
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Mandela, Nelson. (2026, January 18). If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-there-are-dreams-about-a-beautiful-south-1026/

Chicago Style
Mandela, Nelson. "If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-there-are-dreams-about-a-beautiful-south-1026/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-there-are-dreams-about-a-beautiful-south-1026/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela (July 18, 1918 - December 5, 2013) was a Statesman from South Africa.

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