A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
An angry man is always a stupid man.
As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.
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.
Nobody can teach me who I am.
Become familiar with your home, but know also about your neighbors. The young man who never went anywhere thinks his mother is the greatest cook.
What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens – whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit – in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.
When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.
People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
A goat does not eat into a hen’s stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.
There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.