Top 32 Best Kapuscinski Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. ...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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. This is remembered by everyone even today because, in our thinking, the past takes up more space than the future.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#18. People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#19. When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. Development is a treacherous river, as
everyone who plunges into its currents knows.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed, and
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#31. 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
#32. But with time I came to understand that seeing a rubbery as a humiliation and an affront is an exmotional luxury.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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