Wole Soyinka Quotes

We are the giants who bestride the world like a colossus, while others are mere mortals.

Recognition is the curse I carry with me.

The accumulated heritage—that is what we are celebrating. Mali. Chaka. Songhai. Glory. Empires.

You know this business has to be stopped, Simon. And you are the only man who can do it.

God rot your coward bones! Do you think not enough people die here that you must come and threaten me with death. You spurious spew. You instrument of mortgage. You unlicensed appendage of the steering wheel...

These rites of the dead. I do not know why you take them on,"

The guests we were sent are slaves and lackeys. They have only come to undermine our strength. To preach to us how ignoble we are.

Nonsense, we run a bus. The seats face where you are going

Aroni has taken control. That is when the guilty become afraid.

No! I do not envy him! / Just one woman for me!

Man is a bird without wings and a tree without roots.

Now what am I thinking of? I must be getting tired. No sensible man burns the house to cook a little yam.

the contemporary novel . . . I've read one or two: Rushdie, I've enjoyed, again, exceptionally, Marquez, I love his works: that's another exception. Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing. Then that black American woman writer, Toni Morrison, the author of Sula, Song of Solomon: she's a fascinating writer. Umberto Eco . . . But generally I don't read novels.

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.

Yes, you know damned well what you should have done if you sincerely desired their surrender. You could have dropped it [the atom bomb] on one of their mountains, even in the sea, anywhere they could see what would happen if they persisted in the war, but you chose instead to drop it on peopled cities. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop an atom bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you