By Richard Stengel — 2020
Nelson Mandela was by nature an optimist, but he was as hard-headed as they come. He did not embrace the consoling view of history that, as Martin Luther King said (in a line often quoted by Barack Obama), “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For him, justice was never inevitable. If the world was going to bend toward justice, he would have to do the bending himself.
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