Quotes by Chinua Achebe

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

— Chinua Achebe

Courage

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

— Chinua Achebe

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

— Chinua Achebe

Education

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Life

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

— Chinua Achebe

Success

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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!

— Chinua Achebe

Wisdom

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Education