Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
WOLE SOYINKAHistory teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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.
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But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That’s why I call it the most social of the various art forms.
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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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And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
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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.
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I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
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There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people.
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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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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.
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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.
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It is the human potentials that interest me. I travel and everywhere I go I am amazed at the presence of Nigerians. The intelligence, integrity, productivity, initiative.
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The media must be used effectively to reach the masses. You have to find a new language in which to address the people and demonstrate what is possible.
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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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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.
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As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
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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?
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The man dies in all those that keep silent.
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You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
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I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.
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The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
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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.
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When I say war, I’m not talking about mental war; I’m talking about totally eliminating the obstacles to transformation of our children.
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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.
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We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
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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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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