“If a novel is written in a certain language with certain characters from a particular community and the story is very good or illuminating, then that work is translated into the language of another community.”

We think of politics in terms of power and who has the power. Politics is the end to which that power is put.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

Christianity and Western civilization-what countless crimes have been committed in thy name!

I’m more trying to connect; I’m more listening to people. Whatever I get is very meaningful to me.

We can appreciate each other’s languages. And the question of being uncomfortable about our languages would go away.

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind?

Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.

The Bible in translation is being read to thousands and thousands in Africa. It is an integral part of their functioning and the way they look at the world.

You get another person who operates only in an African language and there are many persons who operate only in African languages; he or she is excluded from all the goodies that come with English.

What is translated from English and into English – and in what quantities – is a question of power.

How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go?

The Bible affects everybody’s life who is a Christian, from the middle class in Europe to the peasant in Africa and Asia.

The same questions are there in Native American languages, they’re there in native Canadian languages, they’re there is some marginalized European languages, like say, Irish.

The Bible has affected their lives, but in translation, since they do not read the Bible in the original Greek or Hebrew.

Through the act of translation we break out of linguistic confinement and reach many other communities.

So what I thought was just an African problem or issue is actually a global phenomenon about relationships of power between languages and cultures.

The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling?

Accept certain inalienable truths.

I also had a mistaken attitude towards certain comrades.

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.

We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

You have a movie and it proves itself and then certain things happen.