Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
Interpretation
Charity can mask deeper social inequalities and is often used by those with privilege to maintain the status quo.
In this quote, Chinua Achebe critiques the notion of charity as a superficial solution to systemic problems faced by the underprivileged. He implies that while charity may provide temporary relief, it ultimately serves to comfort the privileged, allowing them to continue benefiting from a flawed system rather than addressing the root causes of inequality.
In practice
During a fundraiser, to highlight the importance of addressing systemic issues rather than just providing charity.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
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.
It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.
An angry man is always a stupid man.
God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism.
Indeed, the test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.
Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.
God felt, God tasted and enjoyed is indeed God, but God with those gifts which flatter the soul, God in darkness, in privation, in forsakenness, in sensibility, is so much God, that he is so to speak God bare and alone. Shall we fear this death, which is to produce in us the true divine life of grace?
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