Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Favor
Causes
Favors
Understand
Away
Noise
May
Walk
Nothing
Accepting
Make
Cause
Bribe
Men
Walks
Refusing
Trouble

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

Image
A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Chinua Achebe
Image
...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
Chinua Achebe
Image
My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
Chinua Achebe
Image
He is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Beware Okonkwo! she warned. Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!
Chinua Achebe
Image
The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.
Chinua Achebe
Image
As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.
Chinua Achebe
Image
A good leader for instance is somebody like Nelson Mandela. I do not have seen such people coming every generation, maybe every ten generations, every hundred generations. People who are miracle workers.
Chinua Achebe
Image
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
Chinua Achebe
Image
I don't care about age very much.
Chinua Achebe
Image
I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.
Chinua Achebe
Image
If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.
Chinua Achebe
Image
It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escortwithout it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the storyrather,it is the story that owns us.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take.
Chinua Achebe