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The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of 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
Squarely
Nigeria
Failure
Leadership
Simply
Trouble
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.
Chinua Achebe
Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have narrowness of heart and mind is not.
Chinua Achebe
I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
Chinua Achebe
I couldn't tell you why but now I know a story is in fact where you discover who you are, where a culture discovers what it is and I just think that this is a terribly important place to get into and that I would enjoy it.
Chinua Achebe
Whenever I try to do anything on a typewriter, it's like having this machine between me and the words what comes out is not quite what would come out if I were scribbling.
Chinua Achebe
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.
Chinua Achebe
We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it's like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.
Chinua Achebe
[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?
Chinua Achebe
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Chinua Achebe
A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines I never learned to type very well.
Chinua Achebe
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
Chinua Achebe
A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.
Chinua Achebe
I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
Chinua Achebe
I have so many ideas there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you're almost confused, because you don't know where to begin.
Chinua Achebe
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
Chinua Achebe
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.
Chinua Achebe
The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
Chinua Achebe
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.
Chinua Achebe
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
Chinua Achebe
A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.
Chinua Achebe
