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I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we'd never smelled the fumes of petroleum.


Wole Soyinka

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More Wole Soyinka

The blatant aggressiveness of theocracies I find distressing, because I grew up when Christians, Mus...
WOLE SOYINKA The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the should...
WOLE SOYINKA History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accomp...
WOLE SOYINKA I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter.
WOLE SOYINKA I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come a...
WOLE SOYINKA A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts.
WOLE SOYINKA Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private sp...
WOLE SOYINKA My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to ...
WOLE SOYINKA The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.
WOLE SOYINKA Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that a...
WOLE SOYINKA Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there's a lot of work to be done.
WOLE SOYINKA The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, ...
WOLE SOYINKA Nigeria has had the misfortune - no, the fortune - of seeing the worst face of capitalism anywhere i...
WOLE SOYINKA I don't know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yield...
WOLE SOYINKA Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves re...
WOLE SOYINKA One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own res...
WOLE SOYINKA You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life...
WOLE SOYINKA Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
WOLE SOYINKA Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how...
WOLE SOYINKA There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoi...
WOLE SOYINKA Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
WOLE SOYINKA Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity.
WOLE SOYINKA The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
WOLE SOYINKA I like my peace and quiet whenever I can grab it.
WOLE SOYINKA The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
WOLE SOYINKA I am a glutton for tranquility.
WOLE SOYINKA And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of oth...
WOLE SOYINKA Given the scale of trauma caused by the genocide, Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of...
WOLE SOYINKA I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.
WOLE SOYINKA See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet com...
WOLE SOYINKA Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the own...
WOLE SOYINKA The Sudanese government has been playing games with the world, with the Africa Union, in particular,...
WOLE SOYINKA A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment ...
WOLE SOYINKA One's own self-worth is tied to the worth of the community to which one belongs, which is intima...
WOLE SOYINKA We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
WOLE SOYINKA But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of commu...
WOLE SOYINKA Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will h...
WOLE SOYINKA All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be...
WOLE SOYINKA An idyllic period of my existence was when I had a den attached to my home... a writing den, and no ...
WOLE SOYINKA After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year tra...
WOLE SOYINKA No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.
WOLE SOYINKA But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you ...
WOLE SOYINKA Seven is the magic figure, because that's a symbolic figure of my favorite deity, Ogun.
WOLE SOYINKA Probably to me the greatest singer, female voice, is Billie Holiday. And one of the most moving for ...
WOLE SOYINKA England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions...
WOLE SOYINKA [It] takes a jaundiced view of the much-vaunted glorious past of Africa. And I suppose since then I'...
WOLE SOYINKA It's the place to begin, always -- to return to home, literally.
WOLE SOYINKA Obasanjo has openly endorsed violence as a means of governance, embraced and empowered individuals w...
WOLE SOYINKA There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to ...
WOLE SOYINKA My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a cert...
WOLE SOYINKA Just like birds, hunters know no borders.
WOLE SOYINKA Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me persona...
WOLE SOYINKA I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
WOLE SOYINKA The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city.
WOLE SOYINKA A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces
WOLE SOYINKA Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for ...
WOLE SOYINKA One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
WOLE SOYINKA There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other peopl...
WOLE SOYINKA I've done a lot of guerrilla theater in my time.
WOLE SOYINKA We are moving towards a total mockery of constitutionalism. The president has crossed the line of po...
WOLE SOYINKA Obasanjo has acted sufficiently against the constitution to warrant his impeachment. There is more t...
WOLE SOYINKA My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain...
WOLE SOYINKA Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind
WOLE SOYINKA an opportunity for Nigerian civic society, an opportunity for the Nigerian military, and an opportun...
WOLE SOYINKA Let's say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don't think we have a new Nigeria yet.
WOLE SOYINKA Writing in certain environments carries with it an occupational risk.
WOLE SOYINKA I like to say, 'I spend one-third of my time in Nigeria, one-third in Europe or America, and one...
WOLE SOYINKA We Nigerians must reclaim our sovereignty, our civic entitlements.
WOLE SOYINKA The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns.
WOLE SOYINKA African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.
WOLE SOYINKA The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of soci...
WOLE SOYINKA And gradually they're beginning to recognize the fact that there's nothing more secure than ...
WOLE SOYINKA There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
WOLE SOYINKA There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in rel...
WOLE SOYINKA I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and se...
WOLE SOYINKA My father was a schoolteacher, and so I had the advantage of both western educational instruction in...
WOLE SOYINKA Power, of course. The primitive fear of being controlled. It does not matter whether it is an invasi...
WOLE SOYINKA the very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but...
WOLE SOYINKA