I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we’d never smelled the fumes of petroleum.
WOLE SOYINKALooking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there’s a lot of work to be done.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.
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I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.
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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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Culture is a matrix of infinite possibilities and choices. From within the same culture matrix we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation and ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement.
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Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there’s a lot of work to be done.
WOLE SOYINKA -
You have the entire gamut of human experience captured in the mythology of the Yoruba. This is what makes the Yoruba mythology a natural source material for me in my creative endeavours.
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Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.
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As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
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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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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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Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
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Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.
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Each time I think Ive created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
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The media must be used effectively to reach the masses. You have to find a new language in which to address the people and demonstrate what is possible.
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If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?
WOLE SOYINKA