Victor Attah > Victor's Quotes

“Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles.”
― Cheikh Anta Diop, Precolonial Black Africa

“If you reveal your secrets to the wind,
you should not blame the wind for
revealing them to the trees.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Wanderer

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
― Malcolm X

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― James Baldwin

“As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Humour breaks down boundaries, it topples our self-importance, it connects people, and because it engages and entertains, it ultimately enlightens.”
― John Agard, Half Caste and Other Poems

“give your daughters difficult names. give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. my name makes you want to tell me the truth. my name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right.”
― Warsan Shire

“One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Help from a stranger is better than sympathy from a relative.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“A flower earns its honor in the dirt.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“I choose to live by choice, not by chance; to make changes, not excuses; to be motivated, not manipulated; to be useful, not used; to excel, not to compete. I choose self-esteem, not self-pity. I choose to listen to my inner voice, not the random opinion of others. I choose to be me.”
― Miranda Marrott

“The biggest coward of a man is to awaken the love of a woman without the intention of loving her.”
― Bob Marley

“One makes mistakes; that is life.
But it is never a mistake to have loved.”
― Romain Rolland

“No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.”
― Romain Rolland

“I distrust official charity. All charity should be done by stealth.”
― Romain Rolland

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
― Frédéric Chopin

“If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.”
― Joseph Sobran

“But that is who we are, that is where we come from. We are the offspring of metropolitan annihilation and destruction, of the war of all against all, of the conflict of each individual with every other individual, of a system governed by fear, of the compulsion to produce, of the profit of one to the detriment of others, of the division of people into men and women, young and old, sick and healthy, foreigners and Germans, and of the struggle for prestige. Where do we come from? From isolation in individual row-houses, from the suburban concrete cities, from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of nonviolence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation, from the debasement of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism.”
― Ulrike Meinhof

“tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Don't judge a book by its cover”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“One faces the future with one's past.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.”
― Geert Hofstede

“Studying culture without experiencing culture shock is like practicing swimming without experiencing water.”
― Geert Hofstede

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.”
― Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure