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

Chinua Achebe

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Chinua Achebe
Age: 82 †
Born: 1930
Born: November 16
Died: 2013
Died: March 22
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
Educated
Requires
Leadership
Participatory
Healthy
Functioning
Democracy
Robust
Morally
Grounded

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.
Chinua Achebe
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Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
Chinua Achebe
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One would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.
Chinua Achebe
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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.
Chinua Achebe
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After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
Chinua Achebe
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The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.
Chinua Achebe
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It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
Chinua Achebe
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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.
Chinua Achebe
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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
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That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.
Chinua Achebe
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I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.
Chinua Achebe
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If you were to loose the habit of making the effort to get the book and read the words one by one you would have lost something terribly important. So I think that we have a task to ensure that this doesn't happen.
Chinua Achebe
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I find Nigeria very frustrating. I am not alone in this. There are many Nigerians abroad. As you know, the brain drain is just incredible. And when we talk to one another and there is a certain sense of frustration and but I struggle not to let the frustration degenerate into dispair.
Chinua Achebe
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I'm amazed when I think about students today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't. We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out.
Chinua Achebe
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I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.
Chinua Achebe
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A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
Chinua Achebe
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Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
Chinua Achebe
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I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.
Chinua Achebe
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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.
Chinua Achebe
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It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
Chinua Achebe