Chinua Achebe Quotes

In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n'ani ji onwe ya: 'He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.'

Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself.

The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.

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.

A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.

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.

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.

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

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

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.

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

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

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.

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

A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

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

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

The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.

There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.

A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

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

There is no story that is not true.

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. Its not viewed as a serious continent. Its a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people dont do what common sense demands.

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

A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.

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.

You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.

Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.

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.

If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.

When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.

Ogbuef Ezedudu,who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. "It has not always been so," he said. "My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.

Writing is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment-you know that's what you're in for, for whatever time it takes.

Now one of the changes that must come to Africa is the idea of limited rule, I mean in term of how long one leader can stay in power. The era of president for life is not gone yet but it is on its way out and that is one of the problems with Mugabe and others.

Nobody can teach me who I am.

As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.

I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, 'this is it.' Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing ... this is the way I think the world's stories should be told: from many different perspectives.

What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.

The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.” “That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.

When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.

What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from written stories. Each mode has its ways and methods and rules. They can reinforce each other; this is the advantage my generation has - we can bring to the written story something of that energy of the story told by word of mouth.