Best Kapuscinski Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman - and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze - as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter - one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process - sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock - demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution. — Gloria Steinem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because it was enough for one of those favorites of His Distinguished Highness to issue a thoughtless decree. These young smart alecks see it, and they immediately imagine some fatal result and come running to the rescue. They start trying to mend things, straighten things out, patch things up and untangle them. And so instead of using their energy to build their own vision of the future, instead of trying to put their irresponsible, destructive fantasies into action, our malcontents had to roll up their sleeves and start untangling what the minsters had knotted up. And there's always a lot of work to untangling! So they untangle and untangle, drenched in sweat, wearing their nerves to shreds, running around, patching things up here and there, and in all this rush and overwork, in this whirlwind, their fantasies slowly evaporate from their hot heads. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

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