Quotes by 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Whats important is that we recognize the falsehood of the notion that the Third World should be abandoned because its a waste of time.”

“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”

“A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.”

“The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that its this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; It is this.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.”

“The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.”

“I dream of an Africa which is in peace with itself.”

“Art is mans constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”

Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lords holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.

When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth

Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. I have kola, he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his guest. Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it, replied Okoye passing back the disc. No, it is for you, I think, and they argued like this for a few moments before Unoka accepted the honor of breaking the kola. Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.

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.

Looking at a kings mouth, said an old man, one would think he never sucked at his mothers breast.

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.