Skip to content

My lord, we all stand before history. I am a man of peace, of ideas... I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief.

— Ken Saro-Wiwa Trial Speech (1995)

Another quote →

More quotes by Ken Saro-Wiwa

If we had a proper system, they would find that there is not so much oil money around anyway.

I'll tell you this, I may be dead but my ideas will not die.

The proceedings leave no doubt that the judgment has been written in advance. And a sentence of death against which there is no appeal is a certainty... Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues.

The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society's weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.

I repeat that we all stand before history. I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial... The Company has indeed ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come."

Trial Speech (1995)

All Ken Saro-Wiwa quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ken Saro-Wiwa (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.