"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters"

"The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power."

"Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization."

"There is nothing so powerful as truth - "and "often nothing so strange."

"God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it."

"The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good, and difficult for them to do evil."

"If all my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would soon regain all the rest"

"There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession"

"The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves."

"Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death."

"I do not know how to thank you.' 'I can tell you,' said Obierika. 'Kill one of your sons for me.' 'That will not be enough,' said Okonkwo. 'Then kill yourself,' said Obierika."

"He who brings kola brings life."

"I am Fire-that-burns-without-faggots."

"At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population."

"Villages that their leaders came together to save themselves."

"Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own."

"Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten"

"Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father."

"No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man."

"The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave."

"The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again."

"He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

"The clock is ticking"