119 Quotes by Uzodinma Iweala

I think the more complex your idea of who someone is or who a particular group is, the less able you are to separate 'we' and 'outside' or 'us and them.' I think that that's something that we really, really need to pay attention to.

I'm not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I'm not saying it doesn't exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There's music, there's art, there's culture.

There are multiple levels of 'we' and multiple groups that can constitute this idea of who we are. We need to be aware of who we are including and excluding.

When the HIV/AIDS epidemic first appeared, a lot of the reaction was that it's not happening here. It doesn't exist. It's not on the continent of Africa. Then we moved into this other phase, in which it was kind of like, it's everywhere.

I find the sort of unwitting European American outsider who wants to come to Africa to help is a very problematic construction. It's problematic because you don't want to tell people don't aid, don't help, when people feel a need to.

It's a beautiful thing, the desire to help a fellow human who is maybe in a rough spot.

I think the fact that we don't really... that the world really doesn't acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don't really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news articles; that... that it's just kind of glossed over as this thing.

When you relate to a disease, you're afraid. When you relate to a person, there is compassion. You see someone that is like you, that could be like you. You can see yourself in that same situation.

No one can really relate to somebody who has given up entirely.