The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!
CHINUA ACHEBECharity is the opium of the privileged.
More Chinua Achebe Quotes
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Just think of the work you’ve set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can.
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When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.
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Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.
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Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
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And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.
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One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
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I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.
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A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
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The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
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An angry man is always a stupid man.
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There is that great proverb – that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
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It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
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Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation.
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When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth
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People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.
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It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.
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What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens – whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
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The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
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While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
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If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch!’ If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’ But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.
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The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
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My weapon is literature.
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Every generation must find its mission and fulfill it, as Fanon said – or betray it. So it is not something that you can write up on the wall, saying this is what has to be done. Every generation has to discover what it needs to do.
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The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
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Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
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If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
CHINUA ACHEBE