Top 73 Ryszard Kapuscinski Quotes
#1. This is remembered by everyone even today because, in our thinking, the past takes up more space than the future.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#2. Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#3. But with time I came to understand that seeing a rubbery as a humiliation and an affront is an exmotional luxury.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#4. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding, from the corners and cracks of that farmedout field, but often those who have proven themselves strongest, not always those who will create new values but rather those whose thick skin and internal resilience have ensured their survival.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#5. Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed, and
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#6. Herein lies the attractiveness of ethnic agitation: its ease and accessibility. The Other is visible, everyone can recognize and remember his image. One doesn't have to read books, think, discuss: it is enough just to look.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#7. Two lusts breed in the soul of man: the lust for aggresion, and the lust for telling lies. If one will not allow himself to wrong others, he will wrong himself. If he doesn't come across anyone to lie to, he will lie to himself in his own thoughts.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#8. Development is a treacherous river, as
everyone who plunges into its currents knows.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#10. We are here among people who don't contemplate transience and the existence of the soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud just to survive another day.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#11. Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#12. This is natural: one must read Herodotus's book-and every great book-repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#13. In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#14. Photographing expresses human desire to preserve passing time. It is like a man struggling with time that elapses, and in general - a desire to preserve oneself.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#15. The unschooled European mind, inclined to rational reduction, to pigeonholing and simplification, readily pushes everything African into a single bag and is content with facile stereotypes.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#16. When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#17. People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#18. In Poland a man must be one thing: white or black, here or there, with us or against us
clearly, openly, without hesitations ... We lack the liberal, democratic tradition rich in all its gradations. We have instead the tradition of struggle: the extreme situation, the final gesture.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#19. After a day of heat and hunger, one is weak and listless. But a certain stuport, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#20. How do cultures differ from one another? Above all, in their customs. Tell me how you dress, how you act, what are your habits, which gods you honor, and I will tell you who you are. Man not only creates culture, he carries it around with him. Man is culture.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#21. In reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man?
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#22. Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#23. All civilisations have a tendency toward narcissism, and the stronger the civilisation, the more clearly this tendency will appear. It spurs civilisations into conflict with others, triggering their arrogance and lust for domination.This always involves contempt for Others.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#24. ...what has made it possible for us to remain ourselves in spite of so many wars, invasions and occupations, is our spiritual, not our material, strength--our poetry, and not out technology; our religion, and not our factories.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#26. First you destroy those who create values. Then you destroy those who know what the values are, and who also know that those destroyed before were in fact the creators of values. But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer judge or know that what he does is barbaric.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#27. In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#28. God,' he said, 'why have you chastised me with such a terrible deformity as thinking? Why have you taught me to think, instead of teaching me the humility of cattle!
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#29. The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#30. I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#31. People have been making war for thousands of years, but each time it is as if it is the first war ever waged, as if everyone has started from scratch. A
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#32. In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#33. Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#34. The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#35. Amin knew that neither West nor East would criticize him for fear that he would support the other side. He felt he was untouchable and he said so openly.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#36. Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#37. In order to feel contempt, you generally need to cherish some kind of feelings.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#38. Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers - there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#39. There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#40. This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#41. A journalist can not be a cynic, can not forget his humanity and that of the people he meets
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#42. The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#43. Nothing creates a bond between people in Africa more quickly than shaed laughter.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#44. Amin managed to invite both the US and Soviet ambassadors to his palace at the very same time and then deliberately kept them together in his waiting room.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#45. The official independence celebration was going to be held over four or five days, and a group of journalists from all over the world was allowed to fly in, because Angola was closed otherwise.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#46. Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#47. Conditions were so hard. To send the news out, telex was the only means, but telex was very rare in Africa. So if somebody was flying to Europe, we gave him correspondence to send after he arrived.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#48. There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#49. People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus in fact. But between those who want to eat and the bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#51. The extent of one man's guilt may be defined by how much of it is experienced by the party he injured.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#52. People who dislike budging from their homes or walking beyond their own backyards
and they are always and everywhere in the majority
treat Herodotus' sort, fundamentally unconnected to anyone or anything, as freaks, fanatics, lunatics even.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#54. He killed his enemies because he was afraid they would kill him. Amin ordered entire tribes to be put to death, because he feared they would rebel.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#55. Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#56. In the tropics the white feels weakened, or downright weak, whence comes the heightened tendency to outbursts of aggression. People who are polite, modest or even humble in Europe fall easily into a rage here, get into fights, destroy other people ...
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#57. My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#58. Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#60. Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#61. Our job is like a baker's work - his rolls are tasty as long as they're fresh; after two days they're stale; after a week, they're covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#62. Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#63. If the crowd disperses, goes home, does not reassemble, we say the revolution is over.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#65. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#66. I remember that during the period leading up to independence in Angola in 1975, I was the only correspondent there at all for three months.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#67. Every day I practice yoga, read poetry, and translate. What do I need politics for?
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#68. The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#70. In a word, if happiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, far away, in Others.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#71. Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#72. Every one of us living on this planet is an Other in the view of Others - I am in their view, and they are in mine.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#73. The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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