Each time I think Ive created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
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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The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.
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I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.
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A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
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Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.
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Let’s say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don’t think we have a new Nigeria yet.
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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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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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Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
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Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
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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 greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
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As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
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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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Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
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Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
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When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.
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A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.
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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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I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.
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Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.
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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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You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
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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.
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What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that’s my function, but from time to time it’s possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.
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We all have our individual artistic temperaments as well as partisanships in creative directions. And we have strong opinions on the merits of the products of our occupation.
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We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
WOLE SOYINKA