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.
CHINUA ACHEBEPeople create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
More Chinua Achebe Quotes
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There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.
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As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.
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When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.
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In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.
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The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.
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A goat does not eat into a hen’s stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.
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The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
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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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Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
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It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
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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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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!
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Now one of the changes that must come to Africa is the idea of limited rule, I mean in term of how long one leader can stay in power. The era of president for life is not gone yet but it is on its way out and that is one of the problems with Mugabe and others.
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In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
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Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformities.
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When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
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The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
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We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
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I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
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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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Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.
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I don’t like to see mistakes on the typewriter. I like a perfect script. On the typewriter I will sometimes leave a phrase that is not right, not what I want, simply because to change it would be a bit messy.
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A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness
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No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.
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No man however great is greater than his people.
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Charity is the opium of the privileged.
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