Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.
WOLE SOYINKAWhen I say war, I’m not talking about mental war; I’m talking about totally eliminating the obstacles to transformation of our children.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.
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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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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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But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
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Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse – exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality.
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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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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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I don’t really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you’re actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
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We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
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Intolerance 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.
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The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
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Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
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For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.
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No man beholds his mother’s womb Yet who denies it’s there? Coiled To the navel of the world is that Endless cord that links us all To the great Origin. If I lose my way. The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.
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I began writing early – very, very early… I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, ‘Now I’m a writer.’ I’ve always been a writer.
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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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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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You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
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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?
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The man dies in all those that keep silent.
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I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.
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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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When you are looking for corruption, you should look at the entire stratum of the society, while some forms of corruption are direct, others are indirect.
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See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.
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For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
WOLE SOYINKA