Alan Paton
Alan Paton
Alan Stewart Patonwas a South African author and anti-apartheid activist...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 January 1903
eye heart men
What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?
habit could-have-been has-beens
It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.
men inhumanity-to-man trying
There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.
eye cry-the-beloved-country
Happy the eyes that can close
country children hate
There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom. 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 sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.
voice done helping
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.
johannesburg
All roads lead to Johannesburg.
fear belief power-of-love
It is my belief that the only power which can resist the power of fear is the power of love.
st-francis-of-assisi use taught
St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.
Although nothing has come yet, something is here already.
secret dawn cry-the-beloved-country
But when the dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.
law justice judging
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.
christian country practice
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.
men inhumanity-to-man way
The only way in which one can make endurable man's inhumanity to man, and man's destruction of his own environment, is to exemplify in your own lives man's humanity to man and man's reverence for the place in which he lives.