Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago. "
Wole Soyinka
Time
Optimism
Long Time
Related Quotes:
" I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture. "
Wole Soyinka
Words
Where
Up
" Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity. "
Wole Soyinka
Service
Life
Humanity
" There's no way to escape the culture that has evolved, from which we ourselves have evolved. Naturally, we stress it, break it up, reassemble it to suit our own needs. But it is there - a source of vital strength. "
Wole Soyinka
Culture
Stress
Strength
" My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being. "
Wole Soyinka
Reading
Me
Music
" The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must continue to rest. "
Wole Soyinka
Living
Justice
Rest
" No human is completely fearless. "
Wole Soyinka
Fearless
Human
" 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 Soyinka
Way
Adventure
Pride
" Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bullet-proof. I never had that illusion. "
Wole Soyinka
You
Never
People
" After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military disengagement. Did the military truly disengage, however? No. "
Wole Soyinka
Military
Dictator
Death
" The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices. "
Wole Soyinka
Know
Together
Creativity
" We Nigerians must reclaim our sovereignty, our civic entitlements. "
Wole Soyinka
Must
Our
Reclaim
" One's own self-worth is tied to the worth of the community to which one belongs, which is intimately connected to humanity in general. What happens in Darfur becomes an assault on my own community, and on me as an individual. That's what the human family is all about. "
Wole Soyinka
Worth
Me
Humanity
" One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as is happening right now as we are speaking. "
Wole Soyinka
Now
Right
You
" The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns. "
Wole Soyinka
Visionary
People
He
" I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer. "
Wole Soyinka
Poetry
Art
School
" Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake. "
Wole Soyinka
Own
Vision
Work
" I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence. "
Wole Soyinka
Violence
Situations
Attraction
" Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie. "
Wole Soyinka
Lie
Control
Truth
" 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
Truth
Society
Power
" A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice. "
Wole Soyinka
Purpose
Evil
Suffering
" I've done a lot of guerrilla theater in my time. "
Wole Soyinka
Time
Theater
My Time
" See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome. "
Wole Soyinka
World
Strong
See
" Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people. "
Wole Soyinka
You
Fight
Band
" 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
Home
Great
World
" The Sudanese government has been playing games with the world, with the Africa Union, in particular, have been playing for time in order to conclude its mission of ethnic cleansing in the Sudan. "
Wole Soyinka
Time
World
Government
" There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle. "
Wole Soyinka
Makes
Theater
Fingertips
" Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space. "
Wole Soyinka
Dictatorship
Nation
Outer Space
" I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action. "
Wole Soyinka
Think
Confidence
Action
" You always assume for some strange reason that you need three meals a day. "
Wole Soyinka
Always
Need
You
" I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood. "
Wole Soyinka
Start
Writing
Paper