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If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.
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
Easy
Excuses
Reason
Excuse
Leaders
Reasons
Group
Prepared
Groups
Incite
Leader
Manufacture
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
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
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
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
Chinua Achebe
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.
Chinua Achebe
Actually, I identify with all my characters, good and bad. I have to do that in order to make them genuine. I have to understand them even if I don't approve of them. Not completely - it's impossible complete identification is, in fact, not desirable.
Chinua Achebe
Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
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
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
When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.
Chinua Achebe
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
Chinua Achebe
A chief does not hurry.
Chinua Achebe
It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.
Chinua Achebe
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
An angry man is always a stupid man.
Chinua Achebe
Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.
Chinua Achebe
Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe
If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives.
Chinua Achebe
You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.
Chinua Achebe
I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.
Chinua Achebe
We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.
Chinua Achebe
