“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.”

Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

It is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.

When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.

It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations – and seen them die, and seen new ones born again – Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.

In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains – the drab and dowdy digger in the earth.

Success feeds confidence.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend.

You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.

In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.

I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all.

A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

I have a trunk containing continents.

The key to freedom is accepting my own autonomy as an individual, and respecting the autonomy of other individuals, with all of what that means – whatever that means.

Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.

It will probably surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his declaration that ‘property is robbery’ to learn that he was perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived on this planet.

Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts.

I want to be the poster child for taking care of yourself after 40. Obesity is an epidemic in this country and I’m a living, breathing example of what it means to stay healthy.

National security is a really big problem for journalists, because no journalist worth his salt wants to endanger the national security, but the law talks about anyone who endangers the security of the United States is going to go to jail.

Just because somebody happens to disagree with you about something doesn’t mean that they become your mortal enemy and that you should try to destroy them and destroy their life and destroy their family.

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available.