A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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.
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
CHINUA ACHEBE
They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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. This is what people have come to expect. It's not viewed as a serious continent. It's a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people don't do what common sense demands.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not.
CHINUA ACHEBE
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.
CHINUA ACHEBE
What's important is that we recognize the falsehood of the notion that the Third World should be abandoned because it's a waste of time.
CHINUA ACHEBE
A chick that will grow into a cock can be spotted the very day it hatches.
CHINUA ACHEBE
You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors. I see too much parroting, to much regurgitation of half-digested radical rhetoric…
CHINUA ACHEBE
If you don't like someone's story, write your own.
CHINUA ACHEBE
My weapon is literature.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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.
