Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Polish Journalist)

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007) was a Polish journalist and essayist. As an international foreign correspondent, he gained international fame for his books chronicling wars, coups, and revolutions in Africa, the Middle East, and other regions of the world. His books translated into 30 languages, and he won literary prizes in Germany, France, Canada, Italy, the U.S., and was made journalist of the century in Poland.

Born in Pinsk, Poland, now in Belarus, Kapuściński attended university in Warsaw, where he studied history. After graduation, he worked for the youth magazine Sztandar Mlodych (“Banner of Youth”) 1951–58, and the political-cultural weekly Polityka (“Politics”) 1959–61. He moved to the Polish News Agency (PAP) and worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1962–72 and deputy editor in chief, 1974–81. He was a freelance writer 1972–74 and after 1981.

In his early years as a journalist, Kapuściński developed the practice of keeping two journals: one allowed him to work as a reporter, and the other was filled with the experiences he considered beyond description—these he developed into his famous books.

Kapuściński’s best work, Another Day of Life (1976) is a unique and closely observed account of the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola. His best best-known book The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, a chronicle of the decline of Haile Selassie’s regime in Ethiopia, which many Polish readers interpreted as a subtle critique of Poland’s communist regime. Jonathan Miller adapted it for the Royal Court Theatre in 1985.

Among Kapuściński’s other notable books are Shah of Shahs (1982,) on the last days of the Shah of Persia, and collections such as The Soccer War (1978,) Heban (1998; The Shadow of the Sun, 2001) and, closer to home, Imperium (1993,) and Podróże z Herodotem (2004; Travels with Herodotus, 2007,) essays and reportage on the Soviet Union, and five volumes of essays and poems called Lapidarium.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Ryszard Kapuscinski

In a society of little economic development, universal inactivity accompanies universal poverty. You survive not by struggling against nature, or by increasing production, or by relentless labor; instead you survive by expending as little energy as possible, by striving constantly to achieve a state of immobility.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Economics

Our job is like a baker’s work—his rolls are tasty as long as they’re fresh; after two days they’re stale; after a week, they’re covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Journalists, Journalism

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Revolutions, Revolutionaries, Revolution

Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Oppression

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Adversity

A population weakened and exhausted by battling against so many obstacles—whose needs are never satisfied and desires never fulfilled—is vulnerable to manipulation and regimentation. The struggle for survival is, above all, an exercise that is hugely time-consuming, absorbing and debilitating. If you create these “anti-conditions,” your rule is guaranteed for a hundred years.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Survival

Be careful: they have arms, and no alternatives.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Power

Money changes all the iron rules into rubber bands.
Ryszard Kapuscinski

Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we’ll never achieve.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Ideals, Idealism

First you destroy those who create values. Then you destroy those who know what the values are, and who also know that those destroyed before were in fact the creators of values. But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer judge or know that what he does is barbaric.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Value

We follow the mystics. They know where they are going. They, too, go astray, but when they go astray they do so in a way that is mystical, dark, and mysterious.
Ryszard Kapuscinski

When man meets an obstacle he can’t destroy, he destroys himself.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Obstacles, Difficulty

When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can’t be answered.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Topics: Trouble

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