Ryszard Kapuscinski Quotes & Sayings

There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Observing the behavior of individual fowl in a henhouse, we note that birds lower in rank are pecked by, and give way to, birds of higher rank. In an ideal case, there exists a linear order of rank with a top hen who pecks all the others. Those in the middle ranks peck those below them but respect all the hens above them. At the bottom there is a drudge who has to take it from everyone. (Adolf Remane, Vertebrates and Their Ways) — Ryszard Kapuscinski

People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

I'll tell you what colonial experience is. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

So dispatched, Aristagoras traveled to Athens - the most powerful city in Greece. Here he changed tactics: instead of speaking with the ruler, he addressed the crowd (in accordance with another of Herodotus's rules, that it seems to be easier to fool a crowd than a single person) and appealed directly to the Athenians to help the Ionians. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly - stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down new tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the tracks come to an end, he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed be dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev's place. When the tracks end again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward. (Yurii Boriev, Staliniad, 1990) — Ryszard Kapuscinski

When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

When man meets an obstacle he can't destroy, he destroys himself — Ryszard Kapuscinski

I was seized at once with a profound fascination, a burning thirst to learn, to immerse myself totally, to melt away, to become as one with this foreign universe. To know it as if I had been born and raised there, begun life there. I wanted to learn the language, I wanted to read the books, I wanted to penetrate every nook and cranny.
It was a kind of malady, a dangerous weakness, because I also realized that these civilizations are so enormous, so rich, complex, and varied, that getting to know even a fragment of one of them, a mere scrap, would require devoting one's whole life to the enterprise. Cultures are edifices with countless rooms, corridors, balconies, and attics, all arranged, furthermore, into such twisting, turning labyrinths, that if you enter one of them, there is no exit, no retreat, no turning back. To become a Hindu scholar, a Sinologist, an Arabist, or a Hebraist is a lofty all-consuming pursuit, leaving no space or time for anything else. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

The old Mauser was too long, too big, and too heavy for a child. A child's small arm could not reach freely for the trigger, and he had difficulty taking aim. Modern design has solved these problems, eliminated the inconveniences. The dimensions of weapons are now perfectly suited to a boy's physique, so much so that in the hands of tall, massive men, the new guns appear somewhat comical and childish. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning's earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

In order to feel contempt, you generally need to cherish some kind of feelings. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Every day I practice yoga, read poetry, and translate. What do I need politics for? — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

But with time I came to understand that seeing a rubbery as a humiliation and an affront is an exmotional luxury. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

Money changes all the iron rules into rubber bands. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

His Highness worked on the assumption that even the most loyal press should not be given in abundance, because that might create a habit of reading, and from there it is only a single step to the habit of thinking, and it is well known what inconveniences, vexations, troubles, and worries thinking causes. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The next prisoner looks twelve. He says he's sixteen. He knows it is shameful to fight for the FNLA, but they told him that if he went to the front they would send him to school afterward. He wants to finish school because he wants to paint. if he could get paper and a pencil he could draw something right now. He could do a portrait. He also knows how to sculpt and would like to show his sculptures, which he left in Carmona. he has put his whole life into it and would like to study, and they told him that he will, if he goes to the front first. He knows how it works - in order to paint you must first kill people, but he hasn't killed anyone. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The so-called new Russian man is characterized mainly by his complete exhaustion. You may find yourself wondering if he has the strength to enjoy his new-found freedom. He is like a long-distance runner who, on reaching the finishing line, is incapable even of raising his hands in a gesture of victory. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Stalin ordered a road built between Yakutsk and Magadan. Two thousand kilometers across the taiga and the permafrost. They started building it simultaneously from both ends. Summer came, thaws, the permafrost melted, water underran the soil, turned the road into a quagmire, it drowned. Together with the road drowned the prisoners who worked on it. Stalin ordered the work to start anew. But it ended up the same way. Once again, he commanded. The two ends of the road never met, but their builders perhaps met in heaven. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

From a logical point of view, anyone
who sets out to create a Great Civilization ought to begin with people, with training cadres of experts
in order to form a native intelligentsia. But it was precisely that kind of thinking that was unacceptable. Open new universities and polytechnics, every one a hornets' nest, every student a rebel, a good-for-nothing, a freethinker? — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

If the crowd disperses, goes home, does not reassemble, we say the revolution is over. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed, and — Ryszard Kapuscinski

...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

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

Unfortunately, the monarch's satisfaction is not to last long. Development is a treacherous river, as
everyone who plunges into its currents knows. On the surface the water flows smoothly and quickly,
but if the captain makes one careless or thoughtless move he finds out how many whirlpools and wide
shoals the river contains. As the ship comes upon more and more of these hazards the captain's brow
gets more and more furrowed. He keeps singing and whistling to keep his spirits up. The ship looks
as if it is still traveling forward, yet it is stuck in one place. The prow has settled on a sandbar. All
this, however, happens later. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The extent of one man's guilt may be defined by how much of it is experienced by the party he injured. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [ ... ] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything-each eaxchange, connection, conflict-was translated into the language of black and white. [ ... ] Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constitute a homogenous, cohesive force. [ ... ] Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another's cities. It was revelation, a surprise, a shock. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

We do not really know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiosity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him - the delight in life. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

This is a very difficult terrain," Father Johan admitted. "These people ask us how many gods there are in our religion, and whether we have a special god for cattle. We explain to them that there is only one god. This disappoints them. Our religion is better, they say; we have a special god who takes care of cattle. After all, cows are the most important thing! — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

Here it is different, here the past is as alive as the present, the unpredictable cruel Stone Age coexists with the calculating, cool age of electronics - the two eras live in the same man, who is as much the descendant of Genghis Khan as he is the student of Edison ... if, that is, he ever comes into contact with Edison's world. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Vendors still shivering in the still-cool air gathered around me, pushing their wares-chewing gum, biscuits, baby rattles, cigarettes, sold individually or by the pack. I didn't want anything, but they kept standing there; they had nothing else to do. A white man is such an anomaly, a foundling from another planet, that is it possible to stare at him with interest almost forever. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

A journalist can not be a cynic, can not forget his humanity and that of the people he meets — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The witch is a dangerous person. Neither his appearance nor his behaviour betray his satanic nature. He does not wear special clothing, he does not have magical instruments. He does not boil potions, does not prepare poisons, does not fall into a trance, and does not perform incantations. He acts by means of the psychic power he was born. Malefaction is a congenital trait of his personality. The fact that he does evil and brings misfortune owes nothing to his predilections. It brings him not special pleasure. He simply is that way. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Nothing creates a bond between people in Africa more quickly than shaed laughter. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

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

If reason ruled the world would history even exist? — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

Here is an oral tradition, legends passed from mouth to mouth, a communal myth created invariably at the base of the mango tree in the evening's profound darkness, in which only the trembling voices of old men resound, because the women and children are silent, raptly listening. That is why the evening hour is so important: it is the time when the community contemplates what it is and whence it came. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

A population weakened and exhausted by battling against so many obstacles - whose needs are never satisfied and desires never fulfilled - is vulnerable to manipulation and regimentation. The struggle for survival is, above all, an exercise that is hugely time-consuming, absorbing and debilitating. If you create these 'anti-conditions,' your rule is guaranteed for a hundred years. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn't write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does. This is when it seems everyone wants to write a book. Singers and football players, politicians and millionaires. And if they themselves do not know how, or else lack the time, they commission someone else to do it for them ... engendering this reality is the impression of writing as a simple pursuit, though those who subscribe to that view might do well to ponder Thomas Mann's observation that, 'a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

The causes of a revolution are usually sought in objective conditions
general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of this world. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

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

There aren't many such enthusiasts born. The average person is not especially curious about the world. He is alive, and being somehow obliged to deal with this condition, feels the less effort it requires, the better. Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great all-consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact - to look without seeing, to listen without hearing, mainly to preserve onself within oneself. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That, which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant diminished view, although with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

I thought about the terrible uselessness of suffering. Love leaves behind its creation-the next generation coming into the world; the continuation of humanity. But suffering? Such a great part of human experience, the most difficult and painful, passes leaving no trace. If one were to collect the energy of suffering emitted by the millions of people here [Magadan, Russia] and transform it into the power of creation, one could turn our planet into a flowering garden. But what would remain?
Rusty carcasses of ships, rotting watchtowers, deep holes which some kind of ore was once extracted. A dismal, lifeless emptiness. Not a soul anywhere, for the exhausted columns have already passed and vanished in the cold eternal fog. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

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

This is remembered by everyone even today because, in our thinking, the past takes up more space than the future. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

We have such a mixture now, such a fusion of different genres. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Development is a treacherous river, as
everyone who plunges into its currents knows. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

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

In a society of little economic development, universal inactivity accompanies universal poverty. You survive not by struggling against nature, or by increasing production, or by relentless labor; instead you survive by expending as little energy as possible, by striving constantly to achieve a state of immobility. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Be careful: they have arms, and no alternatives. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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