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 SOYINKAIntolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it’s taken on lethal proportions.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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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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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It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.
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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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But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
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Sadness is twilight’s kiss on earth.
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You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
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For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.
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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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I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.
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I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
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The media owes the responsibility to constantly tell the public the truth.
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Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
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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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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.
WOLE SOYINKA