Kinshasa Quotes & Sayings

The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War — Richard Preston

If I had not played basketball and made the millions of dollars that I had made, I would never have been able to build a hospital in Congo. It started in 1997, and 10 years later I was able to unveil the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, named after my mother, in my hometown outside of Kinshasa. It was such a blessing. — Dikembe Mutombo

I can't be calm when I drive through sections of Atlanta that look more like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, than America. — Cynthia McKinney

The same process is now occurring in the developing world, but much more quickly. The population density of metropolitan Beijing has collapsed since 1970, falling from 425 people per hectare to 65. Indian cities are following; Brazil's are ahead. And suburbanisation has a long way to run. Beijing is now about as crowded as metropolitan Chicago was at its most closely packed, in the 1920s. Since then Chicago's density has fallen by almost three-quarters. This is welcome. Romantic notions of sociable, high-density living - notions pushed, for the most part, by people who themselves occupy rather spacious residences - ignore the squalor and lack of privacy to be found in Kinshasa, Mumbai or the other crowded cities of the poor world. Many of them are far too dense for — Anonymous

Don't you wonder sometimes," sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, "about sound and vision? — Aleksandar Hemon

And even though she checked "yes" to all the symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to Americans. Nobody in Kinshasa had panic attacks. It was not even that it was called by another name, it was simply not called at all. Did things begin to exist only when they were named? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I'm not interested in whether I'm better than you; only whether I'm better than yesterday. — Mike Ormsby

Don't tell me Kinshasa, the poorest city in the poorest country in the world, a place where the average per capita income is one goat bell, two bootleg Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and three sips of potable water per year, thinks we're too poor to associate with. — Paul Beatty