Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.
WOLE SOYINKAWe do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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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I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
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The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.
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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 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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Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.
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Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
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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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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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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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I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.
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I don’t really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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I am a very curious person; I’ll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.
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You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
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My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience.
WOLE SOYINKA