Quotes & Sayings About Lagos

Our spaceman may, however, note that between the five groups he has visited there is a historical connection. It was Christians scattered from Jerusalem who first preached to Greeks and founded that vast Greek edifice he observed in 325; it is in Eastern Christianity that we must seek some of the important features and some of the power of Celtic Christian religion. That Celtic religion played a vital part in the gradual emergence of the religion of Exeter Hall. And the Cherubim and Seraphim now in Lagos are ultimately a result of the very sort of operations which were under discussion at the Exeter Hall meeting. — Robert L. Gallagher

You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won't lick anybody's ass, or they don't know which ass to lick or they don't even know how to lick an ass. I'm lucky to be licking the right ass." She smiled. "It's just luck. Oga said I was well brought up, that I was not like all the Lagos girls who sleep with him on the first night and the next morning give him a list of what they want him to buy. I slept with him on the first night but I did not ask for anything, which was stupid of me now that I think of it, but I did not sleep with him because I wanted something. Ah, this thing called power. I was attracted to him even with his teeth like Dracula. I was attracted to his power. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency. — Rem Koolhaas

Everywhere I go, I see young people: Confident, forward looking. I have seen them in Lagos, in Rwanda, in the suburbs of London. — Binyavanga Wainaina

It seems to me that all of us, in our own way, have our own personal lagos. We all have within us a voice that is whispering doubt, that is whispering suspicion, that's telling us there's something wrong, there's something missing, there's something that should be different. And we easily become hypnotized by that voice of doubt. — Arjuna Ardagh

Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter. Lagos has always been undisputably itself, but you would never know this at the meeting of the Nigerpolitan Club, a group of returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had never ever been close to being like New York. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Life in Lagos was locked in a constant struggle against empathy. Empathy was too much to ask for, too much to give: it was good only for beggars to exploit in their sob stories aimed at your pocket through your heart. Heart, in Lagos idiom, meant guts, mettle, even recklessness, but rarely compassion. — A. Igoni Barrett

We Chileans have to be able to understand that in a democracy institutions must function freely and with sovereignty. — Ricardo Lagos

I was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and I moved to Anderson, Indiana, in 2003 to go to school. I finished high school in America, then I went to college. — Dayo Okeniyi

We have obligations towards the innocent, the dead, towards the living, towards our children and their children. — Ricardo Lagos

We don't always come out unbreakable the first time. So we are broken and rebuilt several times, until there is no question that we can stand on our own — Arlene Lagos

It was not as if he did not know what living in Lagos could do to a woman married to a young and wealthy man, how easy it was to slip into paranoid about 'Lagos girls,' those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their throats. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety. — Rem Koolhaas

The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops — Teju Cole

Clearly it is better that, when someone is wanted by the international police, and this person travels, and a country knows about it, that country reports the fact. — Ricardo Lagos

Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling, Nneoma said. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit. — Rem Koolhaas

In Lagos there's a really strong case to resurrect strong parts. Embedded in all of it are some amazing pieces of planning, amazing pieces of engineering and interaction. For instance, the campus of Lagos University is stunningly beautiful, efficient and generous, and that needs to be recognised and preserved. — Rem Koolhaas

There is no reason to have problems between country and country, between government and government, when there is a separation of powers. — Ricardo Lagos

We discovered a person in Lagos who had a fish stall, and within a single square metre she carried two children all the way to Harvard. She supported an unbelievable escape of her children into education. In that sense it was a city completed pixillated, and every pixel contained amazing stories. — Rem Koolhaas

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My obligation as president, and what I promise the country, is that the courts will be able to do their job free of all pressure. — Ricardo Lagos

I've never read a book [ Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon] like it before. Big and sprawling with a million points of view, including sea creatures. It's about an alien invasion that starts in Lagos, Nigeria but, really, that's just the starting point. — Justine Larbalestier

All of them watched the footage, even Fisayo. After it finished, none of them said a word, yet in their minds, they saw plenty. Jacobs saw an end to living with parents who refused to accept him. His sister Fisayo saw all of Lagos in flames. Seven saw infinite possibilities and a people from outer space that could make the world embrace and love everyone. Rome saw the rise of Rome. — Nnedi Okorafor

With reference to viral infections," the Librarian says, "if I may make a fairly blunt, spontaneous cross-reference - something I am coded to do at opportune moments - you may wish to examine herpes simplex, a virus that takes up residence in the nervous system and never leaves. It is capable of carrying new genes into existing neurons and genetically reengineering them. Modern gene therapists use it for this purpose. Lagos thought that herpes simplex might be a modern, benign descendant of Asherah. — Neal Stephenson

The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system. — Rem Koolhaas

The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city. — Wole Soyinka

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business. — Teju Cole

My knowledge of Abuja is not as deep as my knowledge of Lagos. — Babatunde Fashola

Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It's unbelievably unique, but also it's now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations. — Rem Koolhaas

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross. — Ricardo Lagos

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it. — Rem Koolhaas

We need to be more careful, but more compassionate. We must strike, not deal with terrorists, but to broaden our understanding of the world outside our borders. — Ricardo Lagos

Lagos is a metropolis of almost twenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so people come up with all sorts of ways to make a living. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If you're able to grow up in Nigeria and go through certain things, you're able to tackle anything around the world because you're able to live wherever, if you can survive in a city like Lagos or Warri or Niger Delta, as far as I'm concerned. — Nneka

Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative. — Rem Koolhaas

It's important to see how we can advance in healing wounds. — Ricardo Lagos

Adaora was beginning to see why Ayodele's people had chosen the city of Lagos. If they'd landed in New York, Tokyo or London, the governments of these places would have quickly swooped to hide, isolate and study the aliens. Here in Lagos, there was no such order. — Nnedi Okorafor

We fully support the strikes against terrorist targets, not against the country, not against the culture, not against a religion, but against an enemy of them all. — Ricardo Lagos

As governor of Lagos, I never signed a cheque and never fixed contract prices. — Babatunde Fashola

Lagos was built from blood and sweat, and raw ambition. Abuja was designed as a playground for the rich. — A. Igoni Barrett

Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on. — Rem Koolhaas

Let's not interfere with justice ... Let's let justice speak. — Ricardo Lagos

This is not the Chile we want to build. — Ricardo Lagos

After years studying informality in Nigeria, Dutch architect and planner Rem Koolhaas reach the same conclusion. In the West, he writes, "there's a sense of infinite choice, but a very conventional set of options from which to choose." By contrast, "in Lagos, there is no choice, but there are countless ways to articulate the condition of no choice. — Dayo Olopade