Wole Soyinka Quotes

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.

To achieve any change in the minds of the youth, there must be reorientation in terms of materialistic tendencies, corruption and crime generally.

Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.

I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up everyday armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.

Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.

I said: "A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces". In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: "I am a tiger". When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.

Only 4 sets of people can vote for the PDP: (1) those who are intellectually blind; (2) those who are blinded by ethnicity; (3) those who are blinded by corruption and therefore afraid of the unknown, should power change hands; and finally (4) those who are suffering from a combination of the above terminal sicknesses.

A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.

I am a very curious person; I'll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.

The youth should come together to challenge the status quo. They must not give up.

Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there's a lot of work to be done.

The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.

When I was a child, for a public/civil servant to be caught in corrupt practices, that individual will be a pariah. He will be a complete reject of the society; he/she could not raise his or her voice to speak in the public. So what happened between that time and now? That time when a public officer, prison or customs officer caught in corruption hides his face in shame amongst his peers, he just couldn't come out publicly. Today, when they come back, they get chieftaincy titles, they are received in grand style, cows are killed, they ride on white horses.

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.

And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.

Culture is a matrix of infinite possibilities and choices. From within the same culture matrix we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation and ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement.

The man dies in all those that keep silent.

You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.

The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns.

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.

When you are looking for corruption, you should look at the entire stratum of the society, while some forms of corruption are direct, others are indirect.