Chinua Achebe

Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

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.

What's important is that we recognize the falsehood of the notion that the Third World should be abandoned because it's a waste of time.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement It is this.

Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.

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. This is what people have come to expect. It's not viewed as a serious continent. It's a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people don't do what common sense demands.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths it is because we see something which you do not see.

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

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.

People create stories create people or rather stories create people create stories.

In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chestwithout asking to be paid.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths it is because we see something you do not see.