Kenyan Quotes & Sayings

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Our people think: I , Wangari, a Kenyan by birth - how can I be a vagrant in my own country as if I were a foreigner. — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anti-colonial movement. — Tom Morello

Listening to your body does not imply a lack of grit but a willingness to honor true physical limits. Kenyan runners have a reputation for listening to their bodies but certainly do not take it easy on themselves; they are among the world's most gifted and accomplished athletes. — Gina Greenlee

I was ready in 2008 for the Olympic Games but unfortunately I missed the Kenyan trials with a thigh injury. I watched those Olympics but it was tough to watch. But it was good in the end because a Kenyan, Wilfred Bungei, was the champion. — David Rudisha

New Rule: Conspiracy theorists who are claiming that we didn't really kill Bin Laden must be reminded that they didn't think he did the crime in the first place. Come on, nutjobs, keep your bullshit straight: The towers were brought down in a controlled demolition by George W. Bush to distract attention from Hawaii, where CIA operatives were planting phony birth records so that a Kenyan named Barack Obama could someday rise to power and pretend to take out the guy we pretended took out the Towers. And I know that's true because I just got it in an e-mail from Trump. — Bill Maher

To the Kenyan families, school doesn't really matter because none of them are going on to college. Almost all of drop out of school and so, they're spending their time learning things that are important to them. — Robert Sternberg

Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence these came from Kansas, not Kenya. — Ilana Mercer

Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

[We] have sex like Kenyan marathon runners. — Olivia Wilde

A good-for-America immigration policy would not accept people with no job skills. It would not accept immigrants' elderly relatives, arriving in wheelchairs. It would not accept people accused of terrorism by their own countries. It would not accept pregnant women whose premature babies will cost taxpayers $50,000 a pop,1 before even embarking on a lifetime of government support. It would not accept Somalis who spent their adult lives in a Kenyan refugee camp and then showed up with five children in a Minnesota homeless shelter. — Ann Coulter

The island is in Kenya, the water is in Uganda ... But the [Luos, a Kenyan ethnic group] are mad, they want to fish here but this is Uganda. — Yoweri Museveni

The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I'll never forget the first time I ran with a group of Kenyan women in 2004 ... The first mile was way slower than my typical run to the point where I was looking around thinking, "Are they for real? These are the fastest women in the world?" But by mile 5 we were buzzing along, mile six I was hitting the gas, and mile seven I was hanging on for dear life. — Lauren Fleshman

Hellooo." I held out my arm. "An amethyst woman with blue hair is telling you this."
She reached out and scraped her short nails over my arm.
I snatched my arm back. "Ow."
Not body makeup." She frowned and peered at the roots of my hair. "A good die-job or you've really got blue hair."
For now," I said. "I'm half Drow."
She raised an eyebrow.
Dark Elves."
Uh-huhhhh."
During the day I look normal, like you."
With an amused look she held up her arm, showing her dark, golden skin. "You're Kenyan and Puerto Rican? — Cheyenne McCray

When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid - I arrived there in 1991 - but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white government than an average Kenyan had over the Moi government. — Binyavanga Wainaina

It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem. — Wangari Maathai

AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police. — David Bennun

A Kenyan man once said to me, 'You can get used to anything when money's involved.' He used to stick mice up his ass for twenty bucks at a time. -Spider Jerusalem — Warren Ellis

Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

In Kenya, crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of successive Kenyan governments to control either. — Giles Foden

I was born to a Nigerian dad and a Kenyan mom, and coming to the States was really academic. — Dayo Okeniyi

In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party's right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump. Huckabee — Matt Taibbi

But when did this anger take root? When snakes first appeared on the national scene? When water in the bowels of the earth turned bitter? Or when he visited America and failed to land an interview with Global Network News on its famous program Meet the Global Mighty? It is said that when he was told that he could not be granted even a minute on the air, he could hardly believe his ears or even understand what they were talking about, knowing that in his country he was always on TV; his every moment - eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose - captured on camera. — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. — Newt Gingrich

And here's Moses Kiptanui - the 19 year old Kenyan, who turned 20 a few weeks ago. — David Coleman

There's a traditional Kenyan prayer: From the cowardice that dares not deal with new truth, from the laziness that is content with half-truth, from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Good Lord, deliver me. — Joni Rodgers

Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I'd been starved for images of myself. I'd grown up watching a lot of American TV. There was very little Kenyan material, because we had an autocratic ruler who stifled our creative expression. — Lupita Nyong'o

Minus the adverts of TV, the special effects of movies, and the trash of the Internet, live theatre is a personal means to connect with viewers. Lining up eye candy, using graphic words, and teasing or enacting bedroom antics is a lowbrow way to go about it. — Tom Jalio

I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan ... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable. — Binyavanga Wainaina

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest. — Diriye Osman

I always believed that WikiLeaks as a concept would perform a global role, and to some degree it was clear that it was doing that as far back as 2007 when it changed the result of the Kenyan general election. — Julian Assange

I grew up watching foreign programs - American, English, Mexican, and very little Kenyan. 'The Color Purple' was the first time I saw people who looked like me. — Lupita Nyong'o

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago. — Tom Morello

Time and tide waits for no man, to capture time, treasure every moment in your life and let the time that slowly slips away memorable and worthy to be kept as sweet memories — M.O. Kenyan

U.S. Presedent Barack Sadam Husene Obame sit in the darkened Oval Ofice at 2 a.m. wearing hes traditienel Kenyan roabe.
He take one last bite of the Chicago style deep dish pizza that he has flown to him every day on the Amerecan tax payer's dime and wipe the grease off his mouth with the U.S. consititutien.
He get up and walk to desk, where he keeps the Kenyan black magic crystle ball. Its black glow iluminate his face.
"Eeny, meeny, miney, mo - which basic U.S. freedoms are next to go?" he say aloud to no one and every one at the same time.
Then he flash that trade mark Bary Obame million doller grin as a crack of lightning sound in the distence. — Seinfeld 2000

Elephant altruism on the Kenyan plains. With her tusks, Grace (right) lifted the fallen three-ton Eleanor to her feet, then tried to get her to walk by pushing her. But Eleanor fell again and eventually died, leaving Grace vocalizing with streaming temporal glands - a sign of deep distress. Being matriarchs of different herds, these two elephants were likely unrelated. — Frans De Waal

Military commanders choose to overlook the Kenyan proverb that proclaims the power of the flea--"A flea can trouble a lion more than the lion can harm a flea." Most generals would rather be lions than fleas. — William R. Polk

Do you know Aggrey Awori?' Mushana said, 'He's an old man.' Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of '63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge and a nationalist, but he was from a tribe that straddled the Kenyan border, where even the politics overlapped: Awori's brother was a minister in the Kenyan government. 'Awori is running for president.' 'Does he have a chance?' Mushana shrugged. 'Museveni will get another term. — Paul Theroux