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"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."
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"You can become a politician and improve the institutions of power in your country."
"The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike."
"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau."
"The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
"Politics is not leadership. It never has been. It never will be."
"The freest societies are in a constant state of revolution."
"There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant."
"Patriotism is the narcissism of countries."
"Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions."
"Some people had attack dogs. Ghastek had attack lawyers."
Explore more quotes by Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession."
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