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I remember that during the period leading up to independence in Angola in 1975, I was the only correspondent there at all for three months.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

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Ryszard Kapuscinski
Age: 74 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 4
Died: 2007
Died: January 22
Journalist
Opinion Journalist
Photographer
Poet
Reporter
Translator
Writer
Pińsk
Correspondent
Leading
Independence
Period
Periods
Months
Three
Remember
Angola

More quotes by Ryszard Kapuscinski

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The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.
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In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.
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If the crowd disperses, goes home, does not reassemble, we say the revolution is over.
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When man meets an obstacle he can't destroy, he destroys himself.
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I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing.
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Our job is like a baker's work - his rolls are tasty as long as they're fresh after two days they're stale after a week, they're covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.
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My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.
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Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.
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He killed his enemies because he was afraid they would kill him. Amin ordered entire tribes to be put to death, because he feared they would rebel.
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Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination.
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In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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First you destroy those who create values. Then you destroy those who know what the values are, and who also know that those destroyed before were in fact the creators of values. But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer judge or know that what he does is barbaric.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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The extent of one man's guilt may be defined by how much of it is experienced by the party he injured.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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in reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man?
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.
Ryszard Kapuscinski