It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.
WOLE SOYINKAIntolerance 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.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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.
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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 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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Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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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Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
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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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Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
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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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The youth should come together to challenge the status quo. They must not give up.
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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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Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
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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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The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.
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You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
WOLE SOYINKA