Wole Soyinka Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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For generations, people have come to U.S. shores to seek opportunity. It's what my grandfather did a century ago, when he came to Seattle, and worked as a houseboy just one mile from the Washington State governor's mansion that I was privileged to inhabit for eight years.
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I've led a charmed life. I've known people who have been depressed, and I've never had that.
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The country is stronger than the result of any one election. But we shouldn't forget that these are just ordinary people. I wish Americans would look at them level, not down or up - just level. It doesn't take some special dimension to be president.
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If Muslims curse the Christians, then the Christians will curse the Muslims. And people will curse Allah, and Allah will hold us responsible for that.
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As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
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I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.
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People don't just love mysteries. They are obsessed with them - especially the kind that are never definitively solved.
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Basically, the Internet is just the way now. It's the end-all, be-all of self-promotion. It's not like you got to burn CDs and pass them out or sell them. The Internet is a tool that reaches billions and billions of people. It's like a no-brainer to tie it in with self-promotion, or even label promotion.
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I'm not one of those people who needs that gratification of doing, like, 10 films a year.
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I love people, watching people interact. It's a lot of psychology. We learn about ourselves by watching other people's lives on the screen.
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I'm always put in the unfortunate position of asking people to donate money and people I know in bands to play benefit concerts and all this stuff.
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I actually feel like the phrase 'big in Japan' is not appropriate for me. The reason is that there are more people who sympathize with my practice in America than there are domestically in Japan.
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Hungry people are always looking for more. More things to do. More to learn. More responsibility to take on.
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But TV has changed completely. It's not until you come into people's homes that everyone says, 'You're a success now.'
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At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other.
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Forced labor affects the most vulnerable and least protected people, perpetuating a vicious cycle of poverty and dependency. Women, low-skilled migrant workers, children, indigenous peoples, and other groups suffering discrimination on different grounds are disproportionately affected.
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Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Serajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more.
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Pure knowledge is the ultimate emancipator. It equalizes people and sovereign states, erodes the archaic barriers of superstition and promises to lift the trajectory of cultural evolution. But I do not believe that it can change the ground rules of human behavior or alter the main course of history's predictable trajectory.
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A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
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Where you live matters. Whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don't settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle, too - follow them. If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.
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If in the sex scene you happen to be naked in front of a lot of other people you've just got to put that aside, in the same way that you have to put that aside in a fully-clothed intense dialogue scene because you're entering into that particular imaginative state of play.
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I talk about being Australian a lot.
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The jury is still out on whether I'm a genius or not.
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Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there's a lot of work to be done.
