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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

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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
Loses
Leaders
Free
Period
Used
Tend
Best
Election
Long
Periods
Always
Habit
Facility
Lose
Elected
Leader
Particularly

More quotes by 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.
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In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.
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I think the language that we use in dealing with one another is very important. And even if I am called upon to bring out some money to support a regime, and I am entitled to say I do not like what that regime does and obviously I am not going to put money there - you cannot really say this is wrong or this is unreasonable.
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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.
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The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
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When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.
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A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
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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.
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A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.
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It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.
Chinua Achebe
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What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
Chinua Achebe
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The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
Chinua Achebe
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If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.
Chinua Achebe
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When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk
Chinua Achebe
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Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.
Chinua Achebe
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But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
Chinua Achebe
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There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
Chinua Achebe
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When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father’s estate
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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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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