Wole Soyinka

"It was our fathers who said, not I - a crown is a burden when the king visits his favourite's chambers. When the king's wrapper falls off in audience, wise men know he wants to be left alone."

"It is a mindless clown who dispenses thanks as a fowl scatters meal not caring where it falls."

"Only a foolish child lets a father prostrate to him."

"We lift the King's umbrella higher than men but it never pushes the sun in the face."

"The ostrich also sports plumes but I've yet to see that wise bird leave the ground."

"When the dog hides a bone does he not throw up sand?"

"Age has shrunk the tortoise and the shell is full of air pockets."

"When a squirrel seeks sanctuary up the iroko tree the hunter's chase is ended."

"If the young sapling bends, the old twig if it resists the wind, can only break."

"It's a foolish elder who becomes a creditor, since he must wait until the other world, or outlive his debtors."

"You say you get pride and you are still a conductor on a bolekaja."

"Nonsense, we run a bus. The seats face where you are going"

"Do you take me for a common gawper after misery?... My bed is among the dead, and when the road rises a victory cry to break my sleep I hurry to a disgruntled swam of souls full of spite for their rejected bodies"

"...There are dangers in the Quest I know, but the Word may be found companion not to life, but Death."

"God rot your coward bones! Do you think not enough people die here that you must come and threaten me with death. You spurious spew. You instrument of mortgage. You unlicensed appendage of the steering wheel..."

"It’s my life that’s gone into his. I haven’t burrowed so deep to cast good earth onto worthless seeds…."

"Power comes from bending Nature to your will."

"What is one flesh from another? So I tried it again, just to be sure of myself. It was the first step to power, you understand. Power in its purest sense. The end of inhibitions. The conquest of weakness of your too human flesh with all its sentiment."

"Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth."

"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away"

"For me, justice is the first condition of humanity."

"I have always held the view that when you have that situation, you must refuse to be part of it"

"A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces"

"This market is my roost. When I come among the women I am a chicken with a hundred mothers."

"When they get this way there is nothing you can do. It's simply hammering against a brick wall."

"You know this business has to be stopped, Simon. And you are the only man who can do it."

"Is there now a streak of light at the end of the passage, a light I dare not look upon?"

"Then I slowly realised that your greatest art is the art of survival. But at least have the humility to let others survive in their own way."

"Because he could not bear to let honour fly out of doors, he stopped it with his life. The son has proved the father Elesin, and there is nothing left in your mouth to gnash but infant gums."

"Things do not always happen as one plans. There are many disappointments in life. There is always the unexpected. You plan carefully, you decide on one step after another, and then...well, that is life. We are not God. So you see, one cannot afford to be weighed down by the unexpected. You will find that only determination will bring one through, sheer determination. And faith in God. Don't ever neglect your prayers...."

"Yes, you know damned well what you should have done if you sincerely desired their surrender. You could have dropped it [the atom bomb] on one of their mountains, even in the sea, anywhere they could see what would happen if they persisted in the war, but you chose instead to drop it on peopled cities. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop an atom bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you"

"Wild Christian shushed him, but I saw no difference in both their attitudes. I was overwhelmed by only one fact- there was neither justice nor logic in the world of grown-ups"

"It is time to commence the mental shifts for admittance to yet another irrational world of adults and their discipline"

"Change was impossible to predict. A tempo, a mood would have settled over the house, over guests, relations, casual visitors, poor relations, 'cousins,' strays – all recognized within a tangible pattern of feeling – and then it would happen!"

"Man is a bird without wings and a tree without roots."

"The ground that man walks on, has it not always been there?"

"We are the giants who bestride the world like a colossus, while others are mere mortals."

"Power is transient, but the deeds of those who wield it can leave an indelible mark on history."

"Ideas, like everything else, can be corrupted. Power is like that: it pollutes everything it touches."

"We must remember that the only true giants are those who walk with the people, not over them."

"Trouble me no further. The fooleries of beings whom I have fashioned closer to me weary and distress me. Yet I must persist, knowing that nothing is ever altered. My secret is my eternal burden—to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness—knowing full well, it is all futility."

"Now what am I thinking of? I must be getting tired. No sensible man burns the house to cook a little yam."

"When your business men ruin the lesser ones, do you go crying to them? I also have no pity for the one who invested foolishly. Investors, that is all they ever were—to me."

"What are you? Men have killed for me. Men have died for me. Have you flints in your eye? Fool, have you never lived?""

"The totem, my final insult. The final taunt from the human pigs."

"Envy, but not from prowess of his adze."

"My secret is my eternal burden—to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness—knowing full well, it is all futility."

"For the fire consumes all but the arsonist."

"Today, the constituency of fear has become much broader, far less selective."

"If you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fall-outs that come with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself?"