We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest-without asking to be paid.
I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.
The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.
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.
No man however great is greater than his people.
It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.
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.
If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.
The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
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!
It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.
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.
When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.
We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.
A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.