Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.
Interpretation
Criminal actions are universally acknowledged and cannot be justified by religious beliefs.
Wole Soyinka's quote emphasizes that despite the diversity of religious beliefs, all faiths recognize the concept of criminality. It asserts that engaging in criminal behavior cannot be defended or excused by one's religious passion or commitment, highlighting the need for accountability that transcends religious justifications.
In practice
In a debate about the role of religions in modern society.
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.
Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.
I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.
For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.
Did any of you, parents, ever hear your child wake from sleep with some panic fear and shriek the mother's name through the darkness? Was not that a more powerful appeal than all words? And, depend upon it, that the soul which cries aloud on God, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," though it have "no language but a cry," will never call in vain.
All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
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