Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.
WOLE SOYINKAI 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.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
WOLE SOYINKA -
I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
WOLE SOYINKA -
My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.
WOLE SOYINKA -
When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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?
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 -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Let’s say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don’t think we have a new Nigeria yet.
WOLE SOYINKA -
We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
WOLE SOYINKA -
The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it’s taken on lethal proportions.
WOLE SOYINKA






