In his book No Future Without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu writes about Nelson Mandela as a man who was not broken but refined by his twenty-seven years of imprisonment in South Afrca: "Those twenty-seven years and all the suffering they entailed were the fires of the furnace that tempered his steel, that removed the dross. Perhaps without that suffering he would have been less able to be as compassionate and as magnanimous as he turned out to be. And that suffering on behalf of others gave him an authority and credibility that can be provided by nothing else in quite the same way."
— Catherine Ingram, Desmond Tutu, Passionate Presence by Catherine Ingram