politicians-from-kenya

"There’s conflict between the Turkana and Dassanach in Kenya, and the Turkana and the Dassanach across the border… People used to talk about traditional raids. It’s no longer that. People are now well armed and it depends on who has more bullets than the other.There’s absolutely no way that dam can go on and the people in Turkana will survive."

"People always say, “Oh, we are controlling the flooding.” But you cannot alter nature; you cannot fight nature… Lake Turkana doesn’t have an outlet; it is a closed lake. So it depends on that balance of inflow versus evaporation. If you reduce that inflow, the level of evaporation increases. Once you have altered the balance of the lake, you have damaged the ecosystem completely."

"The same [threat] exists in Ethiopia — we cannot ignore that this is an area where communities are also struggling for resources. The communities live a way of life that is like a typical African three-legged stool. They depend on subsistence farming; they depend on fishing; and they depend on pastoralism. If you reduce the floods, it damages their subsistence farming, which is very key to their normal way of life… If you remove one leg, the stool really cannot balance."

"You cannot say ‘development’ is telling people that your way of life doesn’t work anymore,Yes, I think it is a human rights abuse and an environmental abuse."

""The responsibility bestowed upon me as the governor of Nairobi is by no means fate however am confidently state that with your support I am up to the task and I will serve you to the best of my ability"."

"I'm a hardworking person who likes to explore different fields to learn more on different things that affect our livelihoods."

"Our list of challenges are many, politics notwithstanding. But my number one priority is to ensure we start a journey towards making Nairobi a better city for all of us by building working partnerships and relationships with our partners who include; the National government, Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) and Kenya Revenue Authority(KRA) and other stakeholders."

"I vowed to work closely with Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) under Gen. Mohammed Badi."

"My fellow Nairobians I have today take the Governors oath of office and sworn to truly and diligently serve the county of Nairobi without fear, favour or ill will. I commit to working for and with all of you."

"I have got two tattoos on my body and l wear these tattoos boldly, l wear them proudly and l wear them foolishly these are my scars of war and if l was asked to show what l did in my youth l can show these two tattoos."

"They can break our bones but they will never break our spirits"

"My story is about tattoos that you carry in life it doesn't matter what it is that you aspire to be l can tell you that life will leave you with scars whatever your scars are wear them boldly wear them proudly and wear them foolishly and that is my boldly foolish story"

"There are two most powerful days in your life: the day you're born, and the day you discover why. That day standing up in that stadium shouting at the President, I discovered why I was truly born, that I would no longer be silent in the face of injustice."

"June 1, 2009 was the day that we were meant to go to the stadium and try and get the president's attention. It's a national holiday, it's broadcast across the country, and I showed up at the stadium. My friends did not show up. I found myself alone, and I didn't know what to do. I was scared, but I knew very well that that particular day, I had to make a decision. Was I able to live as a coward, like everyone else, or was I going to make a stand? And when the president stood up to speak, I found myself on my feet shouting at the president, telling him to remember the post-election violence victims, to stop the corruption. And suddenly, out of nowhere, the police pounced on me like hungry lions. They held my mouth and dragged me out of the stadium, where they thoroughly beat me up and locked me up in jail. I spent that night in a cold cement floor in the jail, and that got me thinking. What was making me feel this way? My friends and family thought I was crazy because of what I did, and the images that I took were disturbing my life. The images that I took were just a number to many Kenyans. Most Kenyans did not see the violence. It was a story to them. ... That day in the stadium, I stood up as a smart coward. By that one action, I said goodbye to the 24 years living as a coward."

"Where I used to stand up alone seven years ago, now I belong to a community of many people who stand up with me. I am no longer alone when I stand up to speak about these things. I belong to a group of young people who are passionate about the country, who want to bring about change, and they're no longer afraid, and they're no longer smart cowards. So that was my story."

"In spite of being arrested, beaten up, threatened, the moment I discovered my voice, that I could actually stand up for what I really believed in, I'm no longer afraid. I used to be called softy, but I'm no longer softy, because I discovered who I really am, as in, that's what I want to do, and there's such beauty in doing that. There's nothing as powerful as that, knowing that I'm meant to do this, because you don't get scared, you just continue living your life."

"And so I decided to actually start a street to show the images of the violence across the country and get people talking about it. We traveled the country and showed the images, and this was a journey that has started me to the activist path, where I decided to become silent no more, to talk about those things. ... And what is most powerful is that the images have been picked by the media and amplified across the country, across the continent."

"People back home call me a heckler, a troublemaker, an irritant, a rebel, an activist, the voice of the people. But that wasn't always me. Growing up, I had a nickname. They used to call me Softy, meaning the soft, harmless boy. Like every other human being, I avoided trouble. In my childhood, they taught me silence. Don't argue, do as you're told. In Sunday school, they taught me don't confront, don't argue, even if you're right, turn the other cheek. This was reinforced by the of the time. Kenya is a country where you are guilty until proven rich. Kenya's poor are five times more likely to be shot dead by the police who are meant to protect them than by criminals. This was reinforced by the political climate of the day."

"We had a president, Moi, who was a dictator. He ruled the country with an iron fist, and anyone who dared question his authority was arrested, tortured, jailed or even killed. That meant that people were taught to be smart cowards, stay out of trouble. Being a coward was not an insult. Being a coward was a compliment. We used to be told that a coward goes home to his mother. What that meant: that if you stayed out of trouble you're going to stay alive. I used to question this advice, and eight years ago we had an election in Kenya, and the results were violently disputed. What followed that election was terrible violence, rape, and the killing of over 1,000 people. My work was to document the violence. As a photographer, I took thousands of images, and after two months, the two politicians came together, had a cup of tea, signed a peace agreement, and the country moved on. I was a very disturbed man because I saw the violence firsthand. I saw the killings. I saw the displacement. I met women who had been raped, and it disturbed me, but the country never spoke about it. We pretended. We all became smart cowards. We decided to stay out of trouble and not talk about it."

"Next to the discovery of the Turkana boy, the visit to Lascaux ranks as one of the great moments of my life."

"Dots are just one example of an element in Lascaux art, and in all cave art... This is a profusion of nonrepresentational, geometric patterns. In addition to dots, there are grids and chevrons, curves and zigzags, and more. ...The coincidence of these geometric motifs with representational images is one of the most puzzling aspects of Upper Paleolithic art. ...images, six different kinds in all, are shimmering, incandescent, mercurial—and powerful. Called entoptic images—which means "within vision"—these phenomena are products of the basic neural architecture of the human brain."

"People who pass from stage two hallucination to stage three often experience a sensation of a vortex or rotating tunnel around them, and soon have hallucinations filled with iconic images, not just signs. ...It is here that "monsters" appear, part human, part beast, known as therianthropes."

"The question... is whether Upper Paleolithic art bears the telltale signs of Lewis-Williams' three stage neuropsychological model, and could thus be shamanistic art."

"Of the range of images in Upper Paleolithic art, the most arresting are the therianthropes. There are not many... but they seize the imagination. The most famous is the so-called sorcerer... In a manner unusual for Upper Paleolithic images, the sorcerer is staring directly out of the wall, a full-face stare that transfixes the spectator."

"When a San Shaman goes into a trance, he harnesses that power, becomes part of the world beyond, becomes invisible to the singers and dancers around him, and draws images on the rock face. Ask the San who drew the images, and they say the spirits. And the rock face is more than a surface for the paint; it is the boundary of this world and the world beyond. ...part of the meaning of it all, and the rock shelter itself assumes a special status, a place of veneration."

"If the Darwinian package were correct, then we would expect to see the simultaneous appearance in the archeological and fossil records of evidence for bipedality, technology and increased brain size. We don't."

"If the molecular evidence is correct... almost five million years passed between the time our ancestors became bipedal and the time when they started making stone tools. Whatever the evolutionary force that produced a bipedal ape, it was not linked with the ability to make and use tools. However, many anthropologists believe that the advent of technology 2.5 million years ago did coincide with the beginnings of brain expansion."

"We are justified in calling all species of bipedal ape "human." ...the adaptation of bipedalism was so loaded with evolutionary potential—freeing the upper limbs to be free to become manipulative implements one day—that its importance should be recognized in our nomenclature. These humans were not like us, but without the bipedal adaptation they couldn't have become us."

"Rather than living as aggregations of families in nomadic bands, as modern hunter-gatherers do, the first humans probably lived like savanna baboons."

"Natural selection operates according to immediate circumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendent of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it."

"[Fred] Spoor's observations are truly startling, In all species of the genus Homo, the inner ear structure is indistinguishable from that of modern humans. Similarly, in all species of Australopithecus, the semicircular canals look like those of apes. Does this mean that the australopithecines moved about as apes do—that is, quadrupedally? The structure of the pelvis and lower limbs speaks against this conclusion. So does a remarkable discovery my mother made in 1976: a trail of very humanlike footprints made in a layer of volcanic ash some 3.75 million years ago."

"The French archeologists Iégor Reznikoff and Michael Dauvois conducted detailed surveys of three decorated caves in the Ariège region of southwest France. ...they moved slowly through the caves, stopping repeatedly to test the resonance of each section... spanning three octaves... those areas with highest resonance were also those most likely to harbor a painting or engraving. ...a fascinating discovery that... Chris Scarre commented at the time, draws "new attention to the likely importance of music and singing in the rituals of our early ancestors.""

"The major sites, such as Altamira, are often surrounded by smaller sites within a 10-mile radius, as if they were centers of political or social alliance."

"Three revolutions mark the history of life on earth. The first was the origin of life itself... The second... was the origin of multicellular organisms... The origin of human consciousness... was the third... Life became aware of itself, and began to transform the world of nature to its own ends."

"It is impossible to imagine existence in the absence of subjective sensation we call reflective consciousness."

"The neurobiologist Harry Jerison has made a long study of the trajectory of brain evolution since the advent of life on dry land. ...the origin of new faunal groups is usually accompanied by a jump in the relative size of the brain, known as encephalization. ...the first archaic mammals... were equipped with brains four to five times bigger than the average reptilian brain... primates are twice as encephalized as the average mammal. Within primates, the apes... are some twice the average size. And humans are three times as encephalized as the average ape."

"Jerison argues that we should think of brains as creating a species' version of reality. ...As brains enlarged through evolutionary time, more channels of sensory information could be handled more completely, and their input integrated more thoroughly."

"The challenge for individuals in primate societies is to be able to predict the behavior of others. One way would be for individuals to have a huge mental bank in their brains, which stored every possible action of their fellow troop members and their own appropriate actions."

"In order to be able to deceive intentionally, an animal must have a sense of how its actions appear to another individual. Such an ability requires self-awareness."

"This tendency to anthropomorphize flows naturally from the context in which consciousness evolved. Consciousness is a social tool for understanding the behavior of others by modelling it on one's own feelings."

"It took men quite a while to have the courage to look at things differently. Diane Fossey was hired by Leakey to do the research with primates. He selected women on their ability to have compassion and empathy. He did not select his graduate students to do that particular research. He was forward-thinking about the capacities of women in that way."

"When our ancestors discovered the trick of consistently producing sharp stone flakes, it constituted a major breakthrough in human prehistory. ...The modest flake... is a highly effective implement for cutting through all but the toughest of hides... the humans who made and used these simple stone flakes thereby availed themselves of a new energy source—animal protein."

"I do not believe in a god who has or had a human form and to whom I owe my existence. I believe it is the man who created God in his image and not the other way round."

"Protecting elephants and conserving natural ecosystems remain my personal priorities. But I am not so sure this would be so were I ill, hungry, and living in dispair. ...We must somehow find a way to provide for our own species if we are also to preserve others."

"I'm known for speaking my mind, a trait I probably inherited from my parents, Louis and Mary Leakey—neither of whom was renowned for tact."

"I think both Louis and I were looking for more or less the same thing, and that is, when did our species, Homo, begin?"

"A vital leap in the evolution of intellectual capacity would have been the ability to form concepts, to conceive of individual objects as belonging to distinct classes, and thus do away with the almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another. Concepts, moreover, can be manipulated and this is the root of abstract thought and of invention. The formation of concepts is also a necessary, but apparently not sufficient, condition for the emergence of language."

"Ever since Darwin tied knots between human beings and the rest of the animal world, many people have frantically attempted to untie them again, declaring that even though our roots are in the animal world we have left them so far behind as to make any comparisons utterly meaningless. To some extent this is true, because the quality that makes us unique in the biological kingdom is the enormous capacity to learn."

"The quality that accompanies the emergence of learning in the evolution of higher animals, namely intelligence, is surprisingly difficult to define."

"In its extreme form self-awareness manifests itself in notions such as that of the soul, but in simple form it merely means to be aware of oneself as an individual among others."