K'naan Quotes

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

I love telling stories; I always have, and I think women need to be more proactive about telling their own stories and sharing their points of view.

What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.

History is written by the victors.

Wolves can't catch what dogs do not expose.

History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.

No other creatures of the savannah sleep as deeply or as soundly as lions, but after all, lions are the main reason for not sleeping soundly.

There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues.

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.

Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar?

When you say, "History is written by the winners," you like to think about someone who isn't you. You want to think, "Oh, that's the juggernaut I'm standing against." But you're probably part of it.

We can't all be lions in this world. There must be some lambs, harmless, kindly, gregarious creatures for eating and shearing.

Don't fight the rabbits. If you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you.

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

Why, that's like being told to go up in the hills to find lions, only you do not know whether there are any lions, but if there are, they may be hunting you, and they may be disguised as bushes. Oh, and if you find any lions, try not to let them eat you before you can tell where they are. -Elayne

History is the propaganda of the victors.

If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; but if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.

I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.

Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."

People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.