Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' - the ultimate unreality in a finite world.

Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

[On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed.

Each human spirit is immortalfor time cannot destroy

It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

I wonder if those experts who tell us that our sexual appetite is the strongest know what real thirst feels like; I can imagine the desire for water driving someone to commit a crime to which sexual desire could never drive them.

hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.