Chinua Achebe Quotes

If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.

Our objective is complete freedom, justice and equality by any means necessary.

Perhaps we can bring the day when children will learn from their earliest days that being fully man and fully woman means to give one's life to the liberation of the brother [and sister] who suffers. It is up to each one of us. It won't happen unless we decide to use our lives to show the way.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

The day that the black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he's within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don't think he'll be by himself.

It's not a real name," she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. It's one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants.

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

Struggle for freedom. Where people are denied the right of choice, recourse to such struggle is the only means of achieving their liberties.

It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.

In the late '60s, people were saying we need power to, not power over. Power to do, accomplish, create, not power over other people.

Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name.

From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.

I have crossed over on the backs of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Madam C. J. Walker. Because of them I can now live the dream. I am the seed of the free, and I know it. I intend to bear great fruit.

Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means.

Set it up in Zimbabwe, Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny, And in this judgment there is no partiality. So arm in arms, with arms, we'll fight this little struggle, 'Cause that's the only way we can overcome our little trouble.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

If you're black living in the community and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.

The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves.

We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.

Russell Means is quite a legend in the Indian community for what he's been able to achieve. It was a real honor to work with a guy who's been on the front lines of fighting for what he believes in.

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.

I'm not falling anymore. That's what L says, and she's right. I guess you could say I'm flying. We both are. And I'm pretty sure somewhere up there in the real blue sky and carpenter bee greatness, Amma's flying, too. We all are, depending on how you look at it. Flying or falling, it's up to us. Because the sky isn't really made of blue paint, and there aren't just two kinds of people in this world, the stupid and the stuck. We only think there are. Don't waste your time with either-with anything. It's not worth it.

Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people. Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realized the light of their own freedom.

Femininity for me means happiness and freedom...freedom of being who you are in whatever shape or size you come in.