But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.
WOLE SOYINKAIf man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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Let’s say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don’t think we have a new Nigeria yet.
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The man dies in all those that keep silent.
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Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there’s a lot of work to be done.
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Intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it’s taken on lethal proportions.
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The youth should come together to challenge the status quo. They must not give up.
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The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.
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I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up everyday armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.
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What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that’s my function, but from time to time it’s possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.
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When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.
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We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
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As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
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Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
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I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.
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I don’t really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.
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There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?
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My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.
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History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.
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Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
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Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
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There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.
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We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
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You cannot live a normal existence if you haven’t taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.
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I’m not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I’ve never understood.
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. . . as far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare – how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.
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Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.
WOLE SOYINKA