One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
AUTHOR QUOTES
Quotes by Chinua Achebe
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Chinua Achebe. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
EXPLORE BY TOPIC
Selected quotes by Chinua Achebe
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.
When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.
When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.
What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.
The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don't expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck.
People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.
Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.
The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!
Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.
More quotes attributed to Chinua Achebe are available across the Mayalines library.
Related author collections
Explore authors represented in the same topics.