Chinua Achebe

I wouldn't put myself under the democratic dictatorship even of angels and archangels.

Aha! Come to think of it, that might explain the insistence of the oppressed that the oppressor must not be allowed to camouflage his appearance or confuse the poor by stealing and masquerading in their clothes. Perhaps it is the demand of that primitive integrity of the earth... Or, who knows, it might also be something less innocent (for the earth does have its streak of peasant cunning) - an insistence that your badge of privilege must never leave your breast, nor your coat of many colours your back... so that... on the wrathful day of reckoning... you will be as conspicuous as a peacock!

Charity is the opium of the privileged,

Those who mismanage our affairs would silence our criticism by pretending they have facts not available to the rest of us. Our best weapon against them is not to marshal facts, of which they are truly managers, but passion. Passion is our hope and strength.

The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its women folk who had domestic responsibilities as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near.

The guilty suffers; the sufferer is guilty. As for the righteous, those whose arms are straight, they will always prosper!

That we may accept a limitation on our actions but never, under no circumstances, must we accept restriction on our thinking.

My people have a saying which my father often used. A man whose horse is missing will look everywhere even in the roof.

It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know.

Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth.

A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.

As the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth-living.