Words matter. These are the best Ryszard Kapuscinski Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we’ll never achieve.
The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.
When man meets an obstacle he can’t destroy, he destroys himself.
The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.
Conditions were so hard. To send the news out, telex was the only means, but telex was very rare in Africa. So if somebody was flying to Europe, we gave him correspondence to send after he arrived.
There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.
I’m trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing.
Underground literature only began in the ’70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle.
Amin knew that neither West nor East would criticize him for fear that he would support the other side. He felt he was untouchable and he said so openly.
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.
My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.
There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience. In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state was a patriotic act.
Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers – there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.
People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.
Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow.
When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can’t be answered.
I’ll tell you what colonial experience is.
Money changes all the iron rules into rubber bands.
Be careful: they have arms, and no alternatives.
We have such a mixture now, such a fusion of different genres.
The extent of one man’s guilt may be defined by how much of it is experienced by the party he injured.
I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another.
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.
Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people’s only source of knowledge about the world.
