Wole Soyinka Quotes
Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.
Quotes to Explore
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My second-grade teacher went around the class and asked everybody what they were going to be when they grew up. I said, 'I want to travel the world,' and he said, 'You'll be married and pregnant by 21, just like all the girls in this room.'
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Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.
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When I was 16, I filmed an episode of 'Full House' where my family goes to Disney World. I remember putting on baggy overalls just to hide my stomach. When I watched it, I was pretty disappointed and bummed out looking at myself... I didn't feel good about my own body.
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The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.
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It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.
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Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them.
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Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.
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We must eliminate all nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the grave risk they pose to our world. This will require persistent efforts by all countries and peoples. A nuclear war would affect everyone, and all have a stake in preventing this nightmare.
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You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.
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Every Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition requires a strict spiritual inventory. You aren't supposed to just sit around feeling guilty, but to take action in the real world to set things right.
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The country is too often assumed to be a backward place: The First World has trouble remembering that Haitians were two centuries ahead of us in abolishing slavery and in extending full rights of citizenship to everyone, regardless of race.
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Often Hollywood crews go into third world countries and I don't believe they behave well.
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I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that's a big deal. And if you're going to be a leader - if you're a leader and you're the smartest guy in the world - in the room, you've got real problems.
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We really want to see how the idea of an intellectual action movie is received by the world.
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The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.
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I thinks it really interesting how they throw the world music samples in there. I often wonder what it would be like to do something like that, but use my lyrics and my kind of style.
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For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.
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It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it's much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I'm pretty sure the agency's divorce rate is rather high.
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The name of an iron man goes round the world. It takes a long time to forget an iron man.
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Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
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I think we do better as a country when we go step by step toward a goal, and the goal in this case should be reducing health care costs.
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I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.
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I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program.
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Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.
