No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love
Written byNelson Mandela1918–2013 · South African anti-apartheid leader and first democratically elected President
Mandela wrote it in the closing chapter of Long Walk to Freedom, his autobiography, first published in 1994 — and Wikiquote carries it among his sourced quotations, not among the misattributed or disputed ones. One caveat worth knowing: the sentence does not stop where the popular version stops. It ends “…they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love” Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), closing chapter. (Given in the British/South African spelling; the American Little, Brown text reads 'color'.) Verified via Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Nelson Mandela — South African anti-apartheid leader, lawyer & first democratically elected President. Theme: "No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Where it actually appears
Work
Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
First published
1994 — Little, Brown and Company, Boston (first edition, ISBN 0316545856; 610 pp. per the Internet Archive’s record, though some catalogues, Wikipedia among them, give 630). Some references, including Wikiquote’s section heading, date the widely-circulated edition 1995.
Location in the book
The closing chapter, in the reflective passage that runs to the memoir’s final line. No page number is asserted here — the printings differ.
Wording
Wikiquote’s Mandela page renders it “colour”; its Long Walk to Freedom page renders it “color”, as do Obama’s tweets. The split tracks the British/South African and American printings — though we have not collated a copy of each, so treat that as the likely explanation rather than a bibliographic finding.
I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. … Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.
closing chapter
Given here in the British and South African spelling “colour”, as Wikiquote renders it; the American edition reads “color”. The ellipsis skips a single sentence, in which Mandela describes glimpsing a flicker of humanity in a prison guard.
Wikiquote prints the full sentence — in this exact “colour” spelling — under its sourced heading for Long Walk to Freedom. The same page maintains separate Misattributed and Disputed sections; this quote is in neither.
Awakin.org reproduces the surrounding passage — the sentence sits between “deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity” and “Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished” — and credits it to Long Walk to Freedom. It names no chapter, and neither does Wikiquote, which files the quote under a bare Long Walk to Freedom heading: the placement in the memoir’s closing pages is our reading of the book, not something the linked sources pin down.
The Internet Archive’s catalogue record pins the first edition: Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1994, 610 pages. That is the number to check any claimed page citation against.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What gets mangled
The attribution here is sound — this really is Mandela, and really is from his autobiography. What goes wrong is the wording. The version that circulates has been cut, respelled and lightly rewritten on its way around the world, and one of those changes removes the half of the sentence that carries the argument.
~
WordingThe clipped version truncation
The quote almost always stops at “they can be taught to love.” Mandela’s sentence does not. Wikiquote gives it in full: it runs on to “for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite” — the clause that turns an observation about hatred into a claim about human nature.
✕
WordingBarack Obama’s 2017 tweets variant
The version most people have actually read is Obama’s, not Mandela’s — though it changes less than the retellings suggest. CBS News reproduces the three tweets of 13 August 2017 verbatim: they keep Mandela’s “if they can learn to hate,” use the American “color,” drop the commas after “skin” and “background,” and break the passage across three posts joined by ellipses. Prose retellings that render it “if they learn to hate” are transcribing the tweets carelessly, not quoting them.
✕
Spelling“colour” vs “color” edition
Both forms are in circulation and neither is a corruption. Wikiquote’s Mandela page renders it “colour”; its Long Walk to Freedom page renders it “color,” and so did Obama. The split almost certainly tracks the British/South African and American printings, but Wikiquote is a wiki with an inconsistent house style, not a bibliographic authority, and we have not collated a copy of each edition — so we state the pattern, not a finding. Citations that treat either spelling as the “real” version are overreaching.
✕
Page number“Long Walk to Freedom, p. 749” unverifiable
A page number widely repeated by quote aggregators, but it cannot be checked against the first edition: the Internet Archive’s record for the 1994 Little, Brown first edition gives 610 pages, and catalogues that disagree (Wikipedia says 630) still fall well short of 749. If you cite a page, cite the printing you are holding.
✓The sentence is genuinely Mandela’s, printed in the closing chapter of Long Walk to Freedom — Wikiquote lists it among his sourced quotations, not among the misattributed ones. The problem is not who said it. It is that what travels is only half of it.
Context
Why it mattered
This is not a greeting-card sentiment, and it was never meant as one. Mandela set it down in the last pages of an autobiography published in 1994 — the year he became South Africa’s first democratically elected President, and the year he had to make a country that had spent decades legislating racial hatred live together without a civil war. Read in that seat, the sentence is a working argument rather than a warm feeling: if hatred is taught, then it is not inherent, and if it is not inherent, reconciliation is a practical programme and not a fantasy.
The passage around it makes the stakes plain. Mandela grounds the claim not in theory but in the prison yard, in the flicker of decency he says he occasionally caught in a warder’s face — enough, he writes, to keep him going. The line that most people never reach is the one that carries the weight: love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
If hatred has to be taught, then reconciliation is a programme, not a fantasy.
How the line travelled
Its modern fame is largely one man’s doing. On 13 August 2017, after the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Barack Obama tweeted the Mandela passage across three posts, the first alongside a photograph of himself at a window with four children. TIME reported that the first tweet drew 2.73 million likes and more than 1.1 million retweets, making it the most-liked tweet in the platform’s history at that point. Almost every version of the quote you now meet online descends from those three posts rather than from the book — and usually from the first two of them only, which is how the closing clause fell off.
A footnote for the curious, offered as an observation and not a source claim: the same idea had a Broadway life first. “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the 1949 musical South Pacific, argues that racism is learned and is introduced by a line insisting it is “not born in you.” There is no evidence Mandela was drawing on it; the convergence is simply worth noticing.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1918–2013 · South African anti-apartheid leader, lawyer & first democratically elected President
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (born 18 July 1918, died 5 December 2013) was a lawyer and African National Congress organiser who was convicted of sabotage in 1964 and spent twenty-seven years in prison, most of them on Robben Island. Released in 1990, he negotiated the end of apartheid and in 1994 became South Africa’s first democratically elected President, serving until 1999. Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography that carries this sentence, appeared the same year he took office — which is why its closing pages read less like memoir than like a governing philosophy being set down on paper.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Long Walk to Freedom (1994)
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. Closing chapter. (Wikiquote and a number of reference works cite the widely-circulated 1995 edition; the passage is identical, apart from the American edition’s “color” for “colour”.)
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/no-one-is-born-hating-another-person-because-of-the-colour/