Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
Interpretation
Justice is a fundamental requirement for a humane society.
In this quote, Wole Soyinka emphasizes the critical importance of justice as a foundational element for humanity. He suggests that without justice, human dignity and coexistence suffer, indicating that a just society is essential for the flourishing of individuals and communities.
In practice
During a lecture on human rights, one might use this quote to stress the importance of justice.
Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
When those deserving of Paradise would enter Paradise, the Blessed and the Exalted would ask: Do you wish Me to give you anything more? They would say: Hast Thou not brightened our faces? Hast Thou not made us enter Paradise and saved us from Fire? He would lift the veil, and of things given to them nothing would be dearer to them than the sight of their Lord, the Mighty and the Glorious.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.