Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques a prevalent mindset in the industrialized world that emphasizes a strong, aggressive approach to problems, often ignoring deeper issues.
Wole Soyinka's quote delves into the concept of 'strong man syndrome,' which refers to the belief that power and strength are the ultimate solutions to challenges facing society. Despite claims of goodwill or moral superiority, many individuals and institutions cling to this misguided notion, undermining the need for genuine understanding and collaborative solutions to complex social issues.
Themes
Strong Man SyndromePowerAggressionSocietyIndustrialized World
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech discussing leadership, one might quote this to illustrate the failure of brute force in addressing societal issues.
More from Wole Soyinka
All quotes →Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
Wole SoyinkaRead
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.
Wole SoyinkaRead
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.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
Wole SoyinkaRead
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Wole SoyinkaRead
Similar quotes
God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.
Woody AllenRead
The soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. It longs to be freed from the chains of the body.
Jostein GaarderRead
What are gold and jewels and precious utensils? Mere dross and dirt. The human face and the human heart, reciprocations of kindness and love, and all the nameless sympathies of our nature - these are the only objects worth being attached to.
William GodwinRead
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night!
Ray BradburyRead
If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed.
Rene DescartesRead