Wole Soyinka

“Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.”

“There's no way to escape the culture that has evolved, from which we ourselves have evolved. Naturally, we stress it, break it up, reassemble it to suit our own needs. But it is there - a source of vital strength.”

“I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be part of the movement away from the unacceptable present.”

“I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter.”

“My father was a schoolteacher, and so I had the advantage of both western educational instruction in the school, as well as what you might call the process of imbibing the traditional processes of education instruction around me.”

“Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people.”

“Power, of course. The primitive fear of being controlled. It does not matter whether it is an invasion from outer space or power wielded from a subterranean command post: some alien force is about to take control on us, to dominate - and, if necessary in the process, to terminate our existence. We never stop to think - or, at best, a secondary consideration is whether such a force might be for the good, that humanity might indeed be improved by such a takeover. Volition, to which we desperately cling, is the very definition of our mature completion as social beings.”

“And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.”

“We Nigerians must reclaim our sovereignty, our civic entitlements.”

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”

“I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.”

“Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land.”

“Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.”

“We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.”

“History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.”

“All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.”

“Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.”

“For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.”

“Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.”

“My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.”