Quotes from Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski

Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.

So dispatched, Aristagoras traveled to Athens—the most powerful city in Greece. Here he changed tactics: instead of speaking with the ruler, he addressed the crowd (in accordance with another of Herodotus's rules, that it seems to be easier to fool a crowd than a single person) and appealed directly to the Athenians to help the Ionians.

Dawn and Dusk - these are the most pleasant hours in Africa. The sun is either not yet scorching, or it is no longer so - it lets you be, lets you live.

We are in a world in which misery condemns some to death and transforms others into monsters. The former are the victims, the latter are the executioners. There is no one else.

Within every great book there are several others.

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.

Whiteness is often associated with finality, with the end, with death. In those cultures in which people live with the fear of death, mourners dress in black, to scare death away from themselves, isolate it, confine it to the deceased. But here, where death is regarded as another form, another shape of existence, mourners dress in white and dress the deceased in white: whiteness is here the color of acceptance, consent, of a surrender to fate.

Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

The scraggly spiders of her words crept around my brain

Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed, and

Everybody knows what the world is like: anything can happen. And here is what happened on the Dune: five people, saving the land, saved themselves. What could they have wanted before that? To try one more time. To have a chance. And they were given that chance. 'It's good,' says Rysiek, 'that they gave it to us. And that it worked out.

The next four girls were led from the wall into the centre, where the red blended with the blue and settled into a respectable purple. Again the couples began absorbedly describing circles on the village-hall concrete to the beat of the song that the scrawny singer was enthusiastically belting out

So what do you talk about?' I asked. One of them replied: 'This and that.' On this basis I could not deduce whether these conversations are interesting or boring, because I do not possess the Egyptological talent that can derive the stormy history of a dynasty from a single hieroglyph

?e nie ma takiego nonsensu, którego umysÅ' ludzki nie byÅ'by zdolny wymyÅ›li?.

Má»™t v?t ch?ng Ä'âu vào Ä'âu tr? thành Ä'i?u gì Ä'ó quan tr?ng vì chúng ta Ä'ã quy?t ??nh nhÆ° th?. Trí t??ng t??ng c?a chúng ta Ä'ã bôi thÆ¡m và tán dÆ°Æ¡ng nó.

In a word, if happiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, far away, in Others.

After all, what is a dollar but paper? A bullet can save your life. Bullets make weapons more significant, and that makes you more significant. A man's life - what is that worth? Another man exists only to the degree that he stands in your way. Life doesn't mean much, but it's better to take it from the enemy before he has time to deliver a blow.

Here is an oral tradition, legends passed from mouth to mouth, a communal myth created invariably at the base of the mango tree in the evening's profound darkness, in which only the trembling voices of old men resound, because the women and children are silent, raptly listening. That is why the evening hour is so important: it is the time when the community contemplates what it is and whence it came.

Usually it is said that periodic droughts cause bad crops and therefore starvation. But it is the elites of starving countries that propagate this idea. It is a false idea. The unjust or mistaken allocation of funds and national property is the most frequent source of hunger. There was a lot of grain in Ethiopia, but it had first been hidden by the rich and then thrown on the market at a doubled price, inaccessible to peasants and the poor.

Alone on the earth! Hamed cries out, and there is a note of terror in his voice, for that is the one thing a Somali cannot imagine: finding himself alone in the world.

Ubóstwo to stan niemo?noÅ›ci wypowiedzenia siÄ™. Ludzie ubodzy nie majÄ… gÅ'osu, nie sÄ… nigdzie szanowani, nie sÄ… tolerowani. KtoÅ› musi mówi? w ich imieniu. To jest przyczyna, dla której o nich piszÄ™.

The world contemplates the great spectacle of combat and death, which is difficult for it to imagine in the end, because the image of war is not communicable – not by the pen, or the voice, or the camera. War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody, dreadful, filthy insides. To others it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more.

Más tarde, cuando se hubieron marchado todos los panaderos, fontaneros, electricistas, carteros y porteros, la ciudad de piedra perdió su razón de ser, el sentido de su existencia. No era más que un esqueleto desnudo pulido por el viento, un hueso roído que sobresalía de la tierra en dirección al sol

Qual'è l'elemento principale dell'incontro? Il dialogo. Scopo del dialogo deve essere la reciproca comprensione e scopo della comprensione il reciproco avvicinamento. Comprensione e avvicinamento si raggiungono sulla via della conoscenza. Qual'è la conoscenza preliminare di questo processo, di quest'equazione? La volontà di conoscere, il rivolgersi all'altro, l'andargli incontro, l'attaccarci discorso.