Chinua Achebe Quotes - Page 2

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.

Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.

When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father’s estate

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.

Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.

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

An angry man is always a stupid man.

My weapon is literature

The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.

No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.

Every generation must find its mission and fulfill it, as Fanon said - or betray it. So it is not something that you can write up on the wall, saying this is what has to be done. Every generation has to discover what it needs to do.

Procrastination is a lazy man's apology.

The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

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

A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!

We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.

Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.

Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see.

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.

The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.

A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?