*The Human Race is Not Yet Free: for Salman Rushdie
“The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to redream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be redreamed. Each reality can have its alternative possibilities. Human beings are blessed with the necessity of transformation.
Related Quotes
A Way of Being Free - Ben Orki
“It is for me an axiom that words create a mysterious reality. That is why my approach to writing essays has always been a personal one. I always aim for uncluttered expression. It seems more courageous to express your thoughts clearly and simply. Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think. It is a curious thing to say, but it is easier to be complicated and complex than to say something truly and simply. Rigour and logic are perhaps not much appreciated, yet without logic, without rigour, writing fails. It took me many years to rid myself of needless complexities.
Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives. It is not those who have no imagination who are the problem, for we all possess imagination, few of us use it well. The problem is with those who are frightened of the rather limitless validity of the imagination, frightened of people who continually extend the boundaries of the possible, people who ceaselessly redream the world and reinvent existence; frontiers people of the unknown and the uncharted.
The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one’s place in the world — a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self-becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.
Either a nation faces its uncomfortable truths, or it is overwhelmed by them; for there is a prophetic consequence in the perpetuation of lies, just as there is an unavoidable fate for all those who refuse to see.
There are some things on earth that are stronger than death. One of these is the eternal human quest for justice; a people cannot live without it, and in due course they will be prepared to die to make it possible for their children.
Fables are made of this.
*Redreaming the World: For Chinua Achebe
“It is possible that a sense of beauty, of justice, of the inter-connectedness of all things, may yet save the human species from self-annihilation. We are all still learning how to be free. Freedom is the beginning of the greatest possibilities of the human genius. It is not the goal.