Time & Perspective Quote by Wole Soyinka

Truth and power are framed here not as uneasy roommates but as sworn enemies, and that choice is Soyinka's tell. He is not offering a comforting civic slogan about speaking truth to power; he is insisting on a structural conflict. Power, in his formulation, is not merely the ability to act. It is the ability to define reality, to appoint "truth" as an administrative function. Against that, truth becomes dissident by default, because it refuses the state's most intimate demand: consent to its story.

The rhetoric does a lot of work with clean oppositions: truth versus power, power versus freedom. Soyinka compresses "the evolution of human society" into a single recurring struggle, a move that sounds sweeping but is strategically clarifying. He's writing as a dramatist, and dramatists know that conflict is not decoration; it's the engine. By casting history as a contest, he turns politics into stagecraft: the protagonists are not nations or parties but forces, with power constantly trying to rewrite the script and freedom constantly trying to improvise.

Context matters. Soyinka's public life includes prison, exile, and direct confrontation with authoritarian regimes in Nigeria. In that light, "hardly ever be resolved" reads less like pessimism than like field intelligence. He isn't claiming that truth always wins; he's warning that any settlement between truth and power is usually a truce written by power. The subtext is bracing: if freedom is the prize, then neutrality is a myth, and the artist's job is not to decorate the palace but to disrupt its narrative.