President Barack Obama said Thursday that the late Nelson Mandela was one of the most “influential, courageous and profoundly good human beings that any of us will share time with on this earth.”
He called the former South African president, who died Thursday at 95, “an example that all humanity can aspire to.”
Also read: Nelson Mandela: 5 Great Interviews in the Life of a Legend (Video)
The president quoted Mandela’s words from the 1964 trial where he was sentenced to a Robbins Island prison for 27 years for standing up to South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Mandela said the ideal of all people living in freedom and harmony was “an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”