Quotes from Chinua Achebe

Do your people have a proverb about a man looking for something inside the bag of a man looking for something?

We may accept limitations on our actions but never . . . on our thinking.

When the moon rose late in the night, people said it was refusing food, as a sullen husband refuses his wife's food when they have quarrelled.

You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it. Had not a Minister of State said, albeit in an unguarded, alcoholic moment, that the trouble was not in receiving bribes, but in failing to do the thing for which the bribe was given? And if you refuse, how do you know that a "brother" or a "friend" is not receiving on your behalf, having told everyone that he is your agent?

And strange are the ways of deep emotion.

La vida de un hombre desde el nacimiento hasta la muerte era una serie de ritos de paso que le acercaban cada vez más a sus antepasados.

Its body was carved with men and pythons and little steps were cut on one side; without these the drummer could not climb to the top to beat it. When the Ikolo was beaten for war it was decorated with skulls won in past wars. But now it sang of peace.

one man with vision—an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance?

When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.

It is not bravery when a man fights with a woman.

The rainbow began to appear, and sometimes two rainbows, like a mother and her daughter, the one young and beautiful, and the other an old and faint shadow. The rainbow was called the python of the sky.

Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.

Looking at a king's mouth, one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.

When a man blasphemes, what do we do? Do we go and stop his mouth? No. We put our fingers into our ears to stop us hearing. That is a wise action.

There was an eccentric editor of the Hansard , the official record of parliamentary debates in Britain. One day, goes the story, an angry member of Parliament stormed into the office of this editor, threw an open copy of the paper on the table, and said to him: "I never said that!" To which the editor replied quite calmly: "I know you didn't, but you should have.

Il n'y a rien à craindre de quelqu'un qui crie

It is appropriate that we celebrate Martin Luther King, a man who struggled so valiantly to restore humanity to the oppressed and the oppressor.

My weapon is literature.

If a child washes his hands he could eat with kings

direction, towards a world of bad systems, bad leadership, and bad followership. The question then is, How do we redirect our steps in a hurry? In other words, where do we begin and have the best chance of success?

he was as good as any young man, or better because young men were no longer what they used to be.

Nothing is falling apart

Was it not a common saying among his people that a man should not, out of pride and etiquette, swallow his phlegm?

The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There is constant change in the world.