112 quotes found
"As remote as the rings of Saturn... A man with his stubby million-rand finger perennially prodding the public's pulse, his eyes constantly roving the horizons of the future, Kerzner has the power of a Prometheus unbound."
"The happy-go-lucky barefoot kid who loved rugby, ice-cream-and-hot-chocolate sauce, staying at home for a braai and the flieks grew up into an international rugby player, idol of millions and South African cult figure..."
"The voice (sometimes an ominous rumble that sounds as though he's been gargling with pebbles, sometimes the bliss of Bailey's Irish Cream swirling lazily about a fine crystal goblet) crescendos almost imperceptibly."
"His voice, like a malted milkshake marinated for more than seventy years, has a slightly monotonous lilt - rather like a Hindu chanting Bagavad Gita."
"the little roly-poly Russian-born rebel of the canvas."
"It is her total professionalism and perennial striving for perfection that elevated Moira from the merely blonde to the maxi-talented."
"The original of the yellow rose is clad (you've guessed it) in canary yellow. The lemon-meringue confection has been poured into yellow slacks and yellow shirt, an immaculate yellow-blonde barbie-doll with 'EFG- Follies-Girl' written all over her."
"A black-belt bullshitter"
"You'd have to be dead not to be impressed by his sincerity. But then didn't Oscar Wilde say say "The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity"."
"I'm impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes, you see."
"to miik the citizens to the extent that they start mooing, is contrary to improving living standards."
"A pervasive moral turpitude underlies South African society."
"I disapproved of the number of men she had traipsing into her bedroom and suggested she should have a turnstile on her bedroom door."
"Whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money."
"a small bewigged ferret"
"The facts of the matter are (that) I did not do any of the things of which I was accused by paid witnesses. But having said that, I'm not sitting here today pleading for the world to believe me because I've come to God. He knows what's in my heart; he knows the truth of the matter. And the witnesses who lied do as well."
"And I think that my whole life, looking back at it, I was so rooted in worldly things, in worldly values, fame, fashion and fortune and all the things that are just transient."
"That night I made copies of all the documents with shaking hands and gave them to a friend with contacts in the British secret services. I had a bitter taste in my mouth."
"Most of the time our discussions are political, because it's hard not to be political in this country (not like in Britain, where you can ignore the rather sedate way everything's going downhill)."
"But despite the fact that everyone thinks that I'm an IFP member, I do not have any political affiliations. I support Buthelezi the man because he makes me believe that heroes still exist."
"Dressing with style is akin to issuing a manifesto; dressing fashionably is like signing a petition."
"I had an idea of her humour from her writing and I'd always appreciated that very English brand of wit. She has a razor-sharp mind... Jani is a very sensitive and emotional person. I don't think I've got the same fine sensitivity or compassion that she has. But finding ourselves on the same wavelength as Christians is more profound and meaningful to me than anything else. Over the years we've warmed towards each other as Christians. That bond, apart from the friendship, rises above all different political ideas. It's more of a spiritual link."
"Your piece on me acted like a bicycle pump and I mooned around for ages, smiling foolishly and cannoning off the wallls."
"[P]leated Trixi Schober trousers in faux-poor crushed linen, jewelled sweaters produced in Mariucca Mandelli's unmistakable hand, a sculpted Karl Lagerfeld handbag, scarves and gloves by Nanni."
"She is not destructive - but she does have a particular facility for puncturing pomposity."
"The only girl who ever knocked me out."
"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."
"I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."
"The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief—and again I ask your pardon—that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten."
"I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men . . . desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it. . . . I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."
"This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. . . . Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end."
"The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions. Allow me a minute. . . ."
"And now for all the people of Africa, the beloved country. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, God save Africa. But he would not see that salvation. It lay afar off, because men were afraid of it. Because, to tell the truth, they were afraid of him, and his wife, and Msimangu, and the young demonstrator. And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger? That man should walk upright in the land where they were born, and be free to use the fruits of the earth, what was there evil in it? . . . They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love."
"The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again."
"...there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."
"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much."
"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."
"I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering."
"Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey,a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house."
"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."
"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."
"Happy the eyes that can close."
"For who can stop the heart from breaking?"
"I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good for their country, come together to work for it. I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."
"It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it."
"Indeed, mother, you are always our helper."
"For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born."
"We do not work for men. We work for the land and the people. We do not even work for money."
"There are voices crying what must be done, a hundred, a thousand voices. But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for one cries this, and one cries that, and another cries something that is neither this nor that."
"...let us sell our labour for what it is worth. And if an industry cannot buy our labour, let that industry die. But let us not sell our labour cheap to keep an industry alive."
"I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul."
"The humble man reached in his pocket for his sacred book, and began to read. It was this world alone that was certain."
"He had come to tell his brother that power corrupts, that a man who fights for justice must himself be cleansed and purified, that love is greater than force. And none of these things had he done. God have mercy on me, Christ have mercy on me. He turned to the door, but it was locked and bolted. Brother had shut out brother, from the same womb had they come."
"...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."
"I say we shall always have native crime to fear until the native people of this country have worthy goals to work for. For it is only because they see neither purpose nor goal that they turn to drink and crime and prostitution."
"For what can men do when so many have grown lawless? Who can enjoy the lovely land, who can enjoy the seventy years, and the sun that pours down on the earth, when there is fear in the heart? Who can walk quietly in the shadow of the jacarandas, when their beauty is grown to danger? Who can lie peacefully abed, while the darkness holds some secret? What lovers can lie sweetly under the stars, when menace grows with the measure of their seclusion?"
"...And the heart is black too, and the world is black, and one can tell oneself that it will pass, but these are only words that one speaks to oneself, for while it is there it is no comfort that it will pass."
"But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offences."
"...when a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive."
"...if man takes unto himself God's right to punish, then he must also take upon himself God's promise to restore."
"For a man can be happy and free, and be cast down by a word. And a woman can be in the depths of misery, and be lifted up by an asking for forgiveness. So one goes from joy to dejection, and hurt to exaltation, and certainty to doubt, as when with some summer storm the whole world is dark and sombre, till suddenly the sun breaks through, almost at its setting, and bathes tree and grass and hill in green and yellow light, the link of which, as the English say, was never seen on land or sea."
"Why a man should have great strengths and great weakness I do not understand. For the first call him to honour, and the second to dishonour; and the first to fame and the second to destruction"
"The light of the body is the eye, and when the eye is true then is the body full of light, but when the eye is evil, then is the body dark."
"A word from you is twice as severe because it comes from you."
"....for the black moods and the angers and the cold withdrawals that robbed her of the simple joys of her quiet and humble life."
"Like many others in the United States, South Africa came into my field of vision when I read Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton's best-selling novel. Reading Cry the Beloved Country may have been the first time I caught an objective glimpse of myself, my family, and the land we cherished and considered ours (although we were sharecroppers, my paternal grandparents had owned land). I began to understand that we were settlers on stolen land, with the native people separate and invisible, that realization dawning against the distant drum of the civil rights movement coming ever closer to home. Yet it was not a sense of guilt I felt; how could I, a dirt-poor half-breed myself, feel guilty in any terms not proscribed by the Baptist preacher? What I felt instead was a sense of enormous responsibility, and that felt liberating, made me feel in control of my destiny, made me feel I could change the world and make a better place for people like me to live in, liberation of the damned as Frantz Fanon put it."
"Cry the Beloved Country was another Uncle Tom's Cabin [1852]- in Africa. The failure in imaginative comprehension of the African character in European fiction lies in the fact that the African is not seen in an active causal-effect relationship with a significant past."
"She would fulfil her obligations as she understood them and provide for them. The only way she could be a mother to her children, she saw, would be to leave them"
"Instead of being kind and buying this and that for the maid, just translate the kindness to this woman’s wages […]"
"once the white child reaches the age of five and has to start school, the black child becomes an embarrassment, a visible reminder of the inequalities endemic in the society"
"the morning paper, the Cape Times, carried the story of the child murdered on the beach. Front page, the story made"
"Today, no one knows the name of the little girl found in a rubbish drum at the back of the butcher’s shop. They don’t know it today, for they never knew it then"
"Now that the pass has gone"
"There are not enough mothers during the day to force the children to go to school and stay there for the whole day. The mothers are at work. Or they are drunk. Defeated by life. Dead. We die young, these days."
"Yet, even today we still laugh sad laughs, remembering our innocent incredulity. Our inability to imagine certain forms of evil, the scope and depth of some strains of ruthlessness. We laugh, to hide the gaping hole where our hearts used to be. Guguletu killed us . . . killed the thing that held us together . . . made us human. Yet, we still laugh."
"Mxolisi turned one year. A part of me hated him. Not him . . . but what he was . . . had been . . . the effect he seemed to have on my life. Always negative, always cheating me of something I desperately wanted. I shrunk; because he was."
"Unganyebelezeli, kuza kudlalwa!’ piped Mxolisi’s little voice, calling for daring and defiance. To look at him do the war cry of the Comrades, poised in a defiant stance, his tiny fist up in the air, couldn’t but send all those who heard him into paroxysms of laughter."
"There was nothing unusual about this. Mxolisi, now four years old, could already tell the difference between the bang! of a gun firing and the Gooph! of a burning skull cracking, the brain exploding."
"No,’ the girl’s mother said quietly. ‘There were many people there. Looking. Some were even laughing. None stopped the crime, none. Until your son arrived on the scene."
"Yes, Mzukulwana,’ he sighed, ‘the biggest storm is still here. It is in our hearts — the hearts of the people of this land. ‘For, let me tell you something, deep run the roots of hatred here. Deep. Deep. Deep."
"The sun went and died in the west."
"Tatomkhulu was a fund of facts that, although seemingly different, made a whole lot of sense of some of the things we learned at school. He explained what had seemed stupid decisions, and acts that had seemed indefensible became not only understandable but highly honourable."
"But now, my Sister-Mother, do I help him hide? Deliver him to the police? Get him a lawyer? Will that mean I do not feel your sorrow for your slain daughter? Am I your enemy? Are you mine? What wrong have I done you . . . or you me?"
"Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race. My son. The perfect host of the demons of his."
"She was not robbed. She was not raped. There was no quarrel. Only the eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage. Bitterness burst and spilled her tender blood on the green autumn grass of a far-away land. Irredeemable blood. Irretrievable loss."
"One boy. Lost. Hopelessly lost. One girl, far away from home. The enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe."
"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over."
"We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable."
"You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind."
"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work…"
"When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband."
"I asked her where the posters in his room came from. She told me she had found some magazines in the forest at a spot where some soldiers had camped and had brought them home. This was shortly before the sexual murders started. I believe those pin-ups were the catalyst that triggered the fantasy that had been brewing inside Zikode since his childhood. His mother had unwittingly lit the tinder which had erupted into a blaze and cost many women their lives."
"The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist."
"South Africa has the third highest murder rate in the world, with Colombia and Swaziland ahead of it. The high rate of murder illustrates the amount of work that a Murder and Robbery detective has to cope with, and yet South Africa holds the record for apprehending serial killers within three to six months of a special investigation team being established, provided the serial killer stays active."
"Every human being passes through five psychosexual developmental phases. They are the oral phase, anal phase, Oedipus or phallic phase, latency phase and the genital phase. A person can fixate in any of these phases and failure to resolve the fixation would be cause for pathology. A layman’s term for a fixation would be a mental short-circuit. It is an individualistic reaction to being exposed to too much or too little of something."
"I had never thought when I did my work that someone would make a TV series about it."
"I was recommended and appointed, as I was writing my doctorate thesis about serial killers."
"I was a tool to help them perform their job of catching criminals and when they saw that my contribution was valuable, they taught me about investigation for I knew nothing about it. In return, I taught them about profiling, and this is how this whole idea came about to train and teach them. I founded the Investigative Psychology Unit of the South African Police Service and worked actively with the detectives I trained."
"Good men and good women can stand together to fight injustice."
"It came after the weeks of intense classes that I conducted in order to teach detectives. There was also an advanced course. At the end of it, I told them “Well, what are you waiting for? Go catch me a killer!” This is how it became the title of the book."
"Since television series or films are often a dramatization of the events that happen in our lives, this has prompted me to launch my own YouTube Channel where I authentically speak about my experiences."
"One of the drawbacks we face today with the internet is the existence of clickbait or synthetic sensational information."
"As a professional psychologist, I therefore, through my YouTube Channel, offer authentic knowledge about forensic psychology. I want this platform to be inspirational and educational for everyone, free of cost and accessible."
"They are not Artificial Intelligence (AI)--generated monsters or Marvel comic book superheroes as often depicted in fictional series. The majority are not mentally ill. They are human beings, they could be your neighbour. Many people would presume that serial killers would be super intelligent, but they are not. They are normal people with average intelligence; few are intelligent and most are not."
"I am somewhere in Mauritius, for example, at the Odysseo oceanarium where one can see the sharks swimming with other fish. Now to us, it’s a dangerous shark but to the other fish, it’s just another fish. It is dangerous, but not a monster, just a fish. This is an analogy of how serial killers are, they move among us; just another person going about their daily lives."
"Having trained the detectives, I told them that if we think of serial killers as enemies, it will be difficult but if we understand them, we will be a step ahead and able to arrest them. But, it isn’t about just arresting them, it is about gathering evidence to get them convicted."
"I never told my family about the full nature of my work. Years later, my father read my book and he was shocked, saying that this was dangerous. I had to reassure him that it was all in the past, and I was now safe. I resigned from the police with the rank equivalent to senior superintendent in 2000."
"I am living from a place of healing."
"Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls. I will never condone what they do, but I can understand them."
"Serial killers exist there, and if one really wants to find them, that is where one has to look. One cannot begin to understand a serial killer's mind if one is unprepared and if one does not know what they feel. One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand."
"The mores that I was used to were neither purely Western nor purely Bantu. We were not ‘black Europeans’, yet I saw how we were not ‘white Bantu’ either."
"Indeed how can they help being so, forced as they are by the present political dispensation to observe us from a distance, which distorts and throws little light on our lives as we live them?"