Wole Soyinka Quotes

This whole family business sickens me. Let everybody lead their own lives,"

...the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations.

Do you take me for a common gawper after misery?... My bed is among the dead, and when the road rises a victory cry to break my sleep I hurry to a disgruntled swam of souls full of spite for their rejected bodies

Trouble me no further. The fooleries of beings whom I have fashioned closer to me weary and distress me. Yet I must persist, knowing that nothing is ever altered. My secret is my eternal burden—to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness—knowing full well, it is all futility.

This market is my roost. When I come among the women I am a chicken with a hundred mothers.

There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life.

Change was impossible to predict. A tempo, a mood would have settled over the house, over guests, relations, casual visitors, poor relations, 'cousins,' strays – all recognized within a tangible pattern of feeling – and then it would happen!

Age has shrunk the tortoise and the shell is full of air pockets.

Today, the constituency of fear has become much broader, far less selective.

Doesn't she look like the type that would drive men to madness and self-destruction?

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...

What is one flesh from another? So I tried it again, just to be sure of myself. It was the first step to power, you understand. Power in its purest sense. The end of inhibitions. The conquest of weakness of your too human flesh with all its sentiment.

The very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but makes us partners of consent.

When the dog hides a bone does he not throw up sand?

A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces