Chinua Achebe Quotes

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.

No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not.

Denying any person their humanity is a game we should all stop playing.

Any attempt to treat people as semihumans only dehumanizes them.

Had courage, wisdom, and reason always prevailed in people, there would not have been oppressions and oppressors.

So live with an inferior as you would wish a superior to live with you.

Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.

To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of huger and deprivation is to dehumanize them. But such has been the terrible fate of all black persons in our country under the system of apartheid.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.

Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.

If you care about injustice, and if you care about freedom, and you care about human rights, then you care about them everywhere.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street.

To be a revolutionary you have to be a human being. You have to care about people who have no power.

When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

I would never disrespect any man, woman, chick or child out there. We're all the same. What goes around comes around, and karma kicks us all in the butt in the end of the day.

There are countries that prefer to think that they're buying comfort at the cost of others, but I don't think that's the way you can act in this world. There are no neutral groups.

The only possible alternative to being either the oppressed or the oppressor is voluntary cooperation for the greatest good of all.

A commitment to sexual equality with males... is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.