Quotes from Thomas Sankara

“While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas”.

“Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa. It is a reconquest that turns each one of us into a financial slave.” Speaking at an OAU summit, 1987.

“You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future”. From an interview with Swiss Journalist Jean-Philippe Rapp, 1985.

“I want people to remember me as someone whose life has been helpful to humanity”.

“Our country produces enough to feed us all. Alas, for lack of organization, we are forced to beg for food aid. It’s this aid that instills in our spirits the attitude of beggars”. From Thomas Sankara Speaks: the Burkina Faso Revolution: 1983.

“We are not against progress, but we do not want progress that is anarchic and criminally neglects the rights of others”.

“Inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women will enjoy equal rights…Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them”. Quoted from ‘The revolution cannot triumph without the emancipation of women’ speech, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, International Women’s Day commemoration,  March 8, 1987.

“Her status overturned by private property, banished from her very self, relegated to the role of child raiser and servant, written out of history by philosophy (Aristotle, Pythagoras, and others) and the most entrenched religions, stripped of all worth by mythology, woman shared the lot of a slave, who in slave society was nothing more than a beast of burden with a human face”. International Women’s Day commemoration,  March 8, 1987.

“The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or because of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the triumph of the revolution. Women hold up the other half of the sky”. Quoted in “We are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions”: Lessons from Thomas Sankara, Akinyemi Adeseye, May, 2010

Do you have any quotes to share? Don't hesitate, leave a comment~

Related: