Chris Ogunlowo > Chris's Quotes

“Igbo sayings and proverbs are far more valuable to me as a human being in understanding the complexity of the world than the doctrinaire, self-righteous strain of the Christian faith I was taught.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work.”
― Biz Stone, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind

“Adopting a career because it’s lucrative, or because your parents want you to, or because it falls into your lap, can sometimes work out, but often, after you settle in, it starts to feel wrong. It’s like someone else punched the GPS coordinates into your phone. You’re locked onto your course, but you don’t even know where you’re going. When the route doesn’t feel right, when your autopilot is leading you astray, then you must question your destination. Hey! Who put “law degree” in my phone? Zoom out, take a high-altitude view of what’s going on in your life, and start thinking about where you really want to go. See the whole geography—the roads, the traffic, the destination. Do you like where you are? Do you like the end point? Is changing things a matter of replotting your final destination, or are you on the wrong map altogether? A GPS is an awesome tool, but if you aren’t the one inputting the data, you can’t rely on it to guide you. The world is a big place, and you can’t approach it as if it’s been preprogrammed. Give yourself the chance to change the route in search of emotional engagement.”
― Biz Stone, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“If a public groundswell occurs without altering people’s attitudes or shifting the cultural dialogue at least slightly, then it’s not a movement—it’s just a fad.”
― Scott Goodson, Uprising: How to Build a Brand--and Change the World--By Sparking Cultural Movements

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
― Joan Didion

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
― Joan Didion

“Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today!”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“— The Igbo are a very democratic people. The Igbo people expressed a strong antimonarchy sentiment—Ezebuilo—which literally means, a king is an enemy. Their culture illustrates a clear-cut opposition to kings, because, I think, the Igbo people had seen what the uncontrolled power of kings could do.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“But a product by itself does not a movement make. People tend to gather and rally around ideas, and usually those ideas have to be expressed in a certain way to get folks fired up. This is the reason why social movements are often associated with iconic images, symbols, or flags; it’s also the reason why many movements develop rallying cries, phrases and words that come to mean something very deep to the people within the movement.”
― Scott Goodson, Uprising: How to Build a Brand--and Change the World--By Sparking Cultural Movements

“Marketers may be reluctant to take a stand against something because it can feel controversial or divisive. But the truth is, some of the boldest marketers have been doing this kind of thing successfully for quite a while: Apple versus “Big Brother” conformity (as represented by IBM), Diesel and Dove taking on advertising and its manipulative ways, and, of course, at the beginning, Volkswagen taking on big cars and America’s “keep-up-with-the-Joneses” consumerism. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
― Scott Goodson, Uprising: How to Build a Brand--and Change the World--By Sparking Cultural Movements

“I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an
encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“expect sadness
like
you expect rain.
both,
cleanse you.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
― Chinua Achebe (Author)

“Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no “normal,” because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can’t compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they’re probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough..”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“The fourteenth-century court artists of Ife made bronze sculptures using a complicated casting process lost to Europe since antiquity, and which was not rediscovered there until the Renaissance. Ife sculptures are equal to the works of Ghiberti or Donatello. From their precision and formal sumptuousness we can extrapolate the contours of a great monarchy, a network of sophisticated ateliers, and a cosmopolitan world of trade and knowledge. And it was not only Ife. All of West Africa was a cultural ferment. From the egalitarian government of the Igbo to the goldwork of the Ashanti courts, the brass sculpture of Benin, the military achievement of the Mandinka Empire and the musical virtuosi who praised those war heroes, this was a region of the world too deeply invested in art and life to simply be reduced to a caricature of “watching the conquerors arrive.” We know better now. We know it with a stack of corroborating scholarship and we know it implicitly, so that even making a list of the accomplishments feels faintly tedious, and is helpful mainly as a counter to Eurocentrism. There”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Our host drifted away, and Vidia and I continued chatting about this and that. Swift judgments came down. The simplicity in Hemingway was “bogus” and nothing, Vidia said, like his own. Things Fall Apart was a fine book, but Achebe’s refusal to write about his decades in America was disappointing. Heart of Darkness was good, but structurally a failure. I asked him about the biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, which he had authorized. He stiffened. That book, which was extraordinarily well written, was also shocking in the extent to which it revealed a nasty, petty, and insecure man. “One gives away so much in trust,” Vidia said. “One expects a certain discretion. It’s painful, it’s painful. But that’s quite all right. Others will be written. The record will be corrected.” He sounded like a boy being brave after gashing his thumb. The”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!”
― Woody Allen

“I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. ”
― George Carlin

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”
― Chinua Achebe.

“Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower

“When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama’s blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, “I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I’m black enough.”) But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women—either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture. Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting “of chocolate.” The line sounds ripped from Essence magazine. That’s the point.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy