Top 470 African Quotes

Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans.

Many African people are smarter than me – kids who could have been better. I have no claim for genius.

The Nobel Prize is worth $1.5 million, but that’s not the issue. Do the distinguished scientists who win the Nobel Prize need the money? Probably not. The honor is more important the money, and that’s the case with the prize for African leadership as well.

I think people hear and feel the genuine nature of my passion for the causes. Specifically, with the non-profit in Uganda, my mother is the president, and she was an African politics professor for almost 50 years, so I think people know that I align myself with people who know what they’re talking about.

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.

I, too, am interested in identity and Islam, which is what people expect of us. But one must not write what is expected. It’s important for North African writers to show they have other things to say.

Virtually all of Darfur’s six million residents are Muslim, and, because of decades of intermarriage, almost everyone has dark skin and African features.

I wish, to be honest with you, for African American films that we could get a few more theaters. They only open them in 1500 to 2000 for an opening weekend, and how do you expect us to compete. How can we go to certain box office levels if they don’t give us more theaters?

The African American community is so under-served in the entertainment industry.

Because I don’t play guitar any more, African harmonies and rhythms have been an inspiration to me. I love the raw origin of the sound. It complements my voice and words naturally.

Where the costs of entry are minimal, there is a wide avenue of opportunity for those with little or nothing, which is why football is just about the most democratic sport of all: African and Brazilian footballers compete on a level playing field with their rich white European counterparts.

As African Americans, we always have to fight for inclusion, despite your moral background: Christian, Muslim, Jewish – it doesn’t matter.

I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn’t be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them – but there’s no way I was touching those bugs.

Trinidad’s language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it’s the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

My name, Solange, means ‘Angel of the sun,’ and I’m completely enamored of my African history. The culture is so expressive.

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.

Perhaps sooner than we think, African innovations will help the rest of the world create lasting social and economic value.

The South African government, unlike a lot of African governments, isn’t poor.

I was taught about slavery, but it was the ancient Egyptians. That’s the closest I got to African history.

Zimbabwe has lots of safaris, but very few are African. Most are white-owned. In our region, we have the most safaris and animals. Our people cannot keep suffering.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

Ever since I watched ‘Roots,’ I’ve dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.

When most people in the West think about Africa, is their first thought about the game reserves and who’s chasing gazelles, or are they looking at Africans as people who are equally equipped to do great things, as in the West?

Before I started Coffee of Grace, I assumed all coffee came from Latin America or Indonesia. I wasn’t familiar with African coffee.

I feel like I come from a smaller off shoot of black people because I am mixed. People say I’m African American but that doesn’t include the other half of me.

Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.

There is no intrinsic reason African countries should be importing, rather than exporting, basic staples like rice or higher value products like frozen chicken, cooking oil, or instant noodles.

Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.

Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror – maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.

My passion is more about bringing the stories out from the African continent mixed with the West.

A lot of groups spend their whole cultural and aesthetic identity trying to move away from Africa, which I think is a mistake. One of the reasons I love Cuba and cultures like that is because they’re not trying to move away from their African roots, they’re trying to embrace them. That’s part of the culture.

When a dish works, it works for everyone, whether you’re Asian, European, African, American or anybody else.

I base myself in African-derived music. Blues is one of the modern forms of African music.

I believe in supporting African solutions to African problems.

When you do a film, you know you’re shooting for 6 or 9 weeks, you’ve got your cast and crew. Overall, no one can just pull the plug and say, ‘This isn’t working.’ There’s just no security on television, especially for African Americans. It’s a tough market.

I loved ‘Ghana Must Go’ by Taiye Selasi. It’s about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.

There’s this idea that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder in an African family is a childless woman – and the lowest rung of all is a motherless child.

Mandela was chosen as a symbol of the South African struggle, and he did that great. But I wasn’t just happy for him. I was happy for the people.

Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn’t like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place.

The working-class Africans are not doing very well, and one of the problems is their education is so shocking. It is routinely said it is a result of apartheid. Deliberately, black people were not allowed to know too much. They could read and write a bit to be useful, but that’s about it.

As a youngster, my parents made me aware that all that was from the African Diaspora belonged to me. So I came in with Caribbean music, African music, Latin music, gospel music and blues.

The world owes an ecological debt to the African continent.

The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans.

Perhaps if we all subscribed to the African concept of Ubuntu – that we all become people through other people, and that we cannot be fully human alone, we could learn a lot. There’d be less hatred and more harmony.

In the last 20 years of collecting contemporary African art, I have been bombarded by incredible shapes and colors that I now want to translate into clothes.

I’m always telling people baseball needs to be more prominent in the African American community. What a better way to do so, going on these TV shows and appearing on the cover of this or that. Now kids can see how baseball can change your life. Frank Thomas did that for me.

You know, it helps having an African American driver behind the wheel. I’m representing that culture and that background. But a lot of background pressure, I don’t really put that on me. I know I have enough pressure to go out and perform every week.

Democrats did not lose control of the Senate because African Americans did not vote. Actually, as supported by preliminary exit poll data, the complete opposite is the case. African Americans increased as a proportion of the electorate in 2014 over 2010.

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.

It’s such a big deal, the notion that these enslaved Africans had marriages and children… because therein lies our humanity, our capacity for love.

The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different nations.