410 Quotes by Chinua Achebe

When you have paid a hundred and thirty pounds bride-price and you are only a second-class clerk, you find you haven’t got any more to spare on other women.

But let the slave who sees another cast into a shallow grave know that he will be buried in the same way when his day comes.

Have you not heard that when two brothers fight a stranger reaps the harvest?

When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father’s estate.

Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord’s holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life – to drive the crowd away from His church.

Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father.

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.

The inquisitive monkey gets a bullet in the face.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’