I want people to remember me as someone whose life has been helpful to humanity.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of contributing positively to society and being remembered for one's helpfulness.
Thomas Sankara's quote reflects a profound desire for a legacy that is centered around service to humanity. It suggests that the true measure of a person's life is not in their wealth or status but in how they have positively impacted others. This perspective encourages individuals to act with kindness and purpose, striving to leave behind a world that is better than they found it.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students about their future impact on society.
Our revolution in Burkina Faso draws on the totality of mans experiences since the first breath of humanity. We wish to be the heirs of all the revolutions of the world, of all the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World. We draw the lessons of the American revolution.
Let there be an end to the arrogance of the big powers who miss no opportunity to put the rights of the people in question. Africa's absence from the club of those who have the right to veto is unjust and should be ended.
We must dare to invent the future
It's really a pity that there are observers who view political events like comic strips. There has to be a Zorro, there has to be a star. No, the problem of Upper Volta is more serious than that. It was a grave mistake to have looked for a man, a star, at all costs, to the point of creating one, that is, to the point of attributing the ownership of the event to captain Sankara, who must have been the brains, etc.
Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave.
It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.
We often assume that if we are good people we will not suffer the ills of the world.
Oh thrice fools are we who like new-born princes weeping in the cradle know not that there is a kingdom before them then let our Lord's sweet hand square us and hammer us and strike off the knots of pride self-love and world-worship and infidelity that He may make us stones and pillars in His Father's house.
Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.
As breath stills our mind, our energies are free to unhook from the senses and bend inward.
Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
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