49 Quotes by Kenyan authors

Kenyan sayings carry the salt of the coast and the dust of the savannah, mixing Swahili cadence with the quick snap of Sheng. They prize harambee, pulling together, yet tease folly with sly humor. Elders’ counsel leans on cattle, rain, and acacia shade, while city voices speak of hustle, matatu art, and stubborn hope. The tone is frank, affectionate, sometimes wry, often musical. They weigh patience against urgency, communal duty against ambition, memory against motion, and always, dignity in everyday labor.

See the complete list of authors from Kenya

"It's the little things citizens do. That's what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"Scientific innovations continually provide us with new means of analyzing the finds"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"Women are responsible for their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is the powerful, including governments, that are responsible"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys from time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"We need to promote development that does not destroy our environment"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"That's the way I do things when I want to celebrate, I always plant a tree. And so I got an indigenous tree, called Nandi flame, it has this beautiful red flowers. When it is in flower it is like it is in flame"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"I am working to make sure we don't only protect the environment, we also improve governance"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"When you think of all the conflicts we have - whether those conflicts are local, whether they are regional or global - these conflicts are often over the management, the distribution of resources. If these resources are very valuable, if these resources are scarce, if these resources are degraded, there is going to be competition"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"It is important to nurture any new ideas and initiatives which can make a difference for Africa"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to conserve the environment so that we can bequeath our children a sustainable world that benefits all"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"When I first started, it was really an innocent response to the needs of women in rural areas. When we started planting trees to meet their needs, there was nothing beyond that. I did not see all the issues that I have to come to deal with"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

Small: Wangari Maathai

"I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn't have any noteworthy problem with it. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"Sadly, I am not able to take part in the fieldwork myself so much anymore, as both of my legs were amputated following an airplane crash twelve years ago"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"The land is not in the least bit fertile and yet the cattle herds grow larger and larger. A cow represents capital investment here"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

"It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads"

Richard Leakey, Environmentalist

Page 1 of 2