56 Quotes by Kwame Nkrumah

Practice without thought is blind. Thought without practice is empty.(note: Two versions of this do not cite the book and are not exact. Action is not part of the equation.)

The passage from the ancestral line of slavery via feudalism and capitalism to socialism can only lie through revolution: it cannot lie through reform. For in reform, fundamental principles are held constant, and the details of their expression are modified. In the words of Marx, it leaves the pillars of the building intact. Indeed sometimes, reform itself may be initiated by the necessities of preserving identical fundamental principles. Reform is a tactic of self-preservation.

It is essential that socialism should include overriding regard tot the experience and the consciousness of a people, for if it does not do so, it will be serving an idea and not a people. It will generate a contradiction. It will become dogmatic. It will shed its materialist and realist basis. It will become fanaticism, an obscurantism, an alienator of human happiness.

Socialism in Africa today tends to lose its objective content in favor of a distracting terminology and in favor of a general confusion. Discussion centers more on the various conceivable types of socialism than upon the need for socialist development.

The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity, integrity, and value. It stands refreshingly opposed to the Christian idea of the original sin and degradation of man.

When we talk of socialism in Africa, therefore, we really do intent to include as part of socialism an overriding regard to our actual material conditions, an overriding regard to our experience and our consciousness.

We face neither East nor West: we face forward.

Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.