The man dies in all those that keep silent.
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
-
-
Well, some people say I’m pessimistic because I recognize the eternal cycle of evil. All I say is, look at the history of mankind right up to this moment and what do you find?
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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 -
There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.
WOLE SOYINKA -
I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Sadness is twilight’s kiss on earth.
WOLE SOYINKA -
We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
WOLE SOYINKA -
I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we’d never smelled the fumes of petroleum.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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 SOYINKA -
But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
WOLE SOYINKA