I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
WOLE SOYINKAMy 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.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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Sadness is twilight’s kiss on earth.
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Each time I think Ive created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
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Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
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For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
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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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To achieve any change in the minds of the youth, there must be reorientation in terms of materialistic tendencies, corruption and crime generally.
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?
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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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I rarely use mythology for its own sake because, as a theatre person, the mythological figures are in fact humanity to the ninth degree and Yoruba mythology in particular has fascination of being one of the most humanised mythologies in the world.
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Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.
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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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A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.
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For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.
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You have the entire gamut of human experience captured in the mythology of the Yoruba. This is what makes the Yoruba mythology a natural source material for me in my creative endeavours.
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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.
WOLE SOYINKA