Quote collection
300 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this."
"An angry man is always a stupid man."
"The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did."
"Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance."
"An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question."
"People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them."
"If you don't like someone's story, write your own."
"No man however great is greater than his people"
"There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others."
"Living fire begets cold, impotent ash."
"I try as hard as possible not to be pessimistic because I have never thought or believed that creating a Nigerian nation would be easy; I have always known that it was going to be a very tough job. But I never really thought that it would be this tough. And what's going on now, which is a subjection of this potentially great country to a clique of military adventurers and a political class that they have completely corrupted - this is really quite appalling. The suffering that they have unleashed on millions of people is quite intolerable."
"No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man."
"And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate."
"Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not."
"Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be."
"Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever."
"Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformities"
"Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?"
"Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come."
"When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day."