Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
WOLE SOYINKAI 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.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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Sadness is twilight’s kiss on earth.
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My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.
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History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.
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We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
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Everybody knows that fraternities are a normal culture in all colleges. It exists in all colleges. President Clinton was a member of a fraternity. In fact, anybody who goes to College in the United States is a member of a College fraternity. There is absolutely nothing evil or occultic about fraternity.
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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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I rarely use mythology for its own sake because, as a theatre person, the mythological figures are in fact humanity to the ninth degree and Yoruba mythology in particular has fascination of being one of the most humanised mythologies in the world.
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Religion has really spawned some monsters. It always has, historically. Go all the way back to the Inquisition, you know, the Crusades, the Jehad and so on.
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My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.
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Intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it’s taken on lethal proportions.
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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?
WOLE SOYINKA -
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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As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
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It is the human potentials that interest me. I travel and everywhere I go I am amazed at the presence of Nigerians. The intelligence, integrity, productivity, initiative.
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I never hesitated, as a student, in embracing the necessity of violence. In South Africa, I didn’t just accept it; I looked forward to it as a mission.
WOLE SOYINKA