Quotes by Ugandan Authors

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.
Idi Amin
The eternal struggle between failure and fortune is a fight not between mortal enemies but sparring partners. So fortune is improved by failure, and the reverse is also true.
Agona Apell
The quality of a conqueror is to be judged as much by what he spears as by what he spares
Agona Apell
Men who attain great heights always have few friends but many admirers, while those who ply the lower reaches of fortune often have many friends but scarcely an admirer in sight
Agona Apell
I rebuke societies that impart to their flowers their cold and rigid demeanour. Flowers should not stand with the stiffness of a soldier on parade but must carry themselves with the relaxedness of a dancer, their arms outstretched above a shaggy mane. Life reveals few sights as distressing as the look of flowers standing mournfully at attention unstirred by the kisses of a million bees. This infection of uncomely reserve is the handiwork of sombre gardeners bred in sombre societies who will not consider their work done till their flowers exude in aspect that stiffness they esteem. They forget that God intended that we mingle with flowers and not merely admire them from afar. But there is a look in a fastidiously manicured garden that makes me keep my distance, a look that draws my eyes but scorns my touch, and that is why I condemn them.
Agona Apell
In the world of oratory, the cunning atheist declares himself a believer so as to preserve access to the rich fund of tales from religious texts and to powerful concepts like God, fate, angels, the soul, & the afterlife.
Agona Apell
The bold display of our unattractive parts is an effective substitute for beauty since it duplicates beauty's principal effects, namely the excitation of admiration, charm, and envy in the beholder, who is moved to wish that they too could carry their own defects with the same ease.
Agona Apell
A book is the only true land of the free: within its borders, anything is possible
Agona Apell
You cannot run faster than a bullet
Idi Amin
There are things to be obtained by law and things to be obtained by claw
Agona Apell
The manager needs only a molehill to build a mountain, but the money-ger needs a full mountain to build another.
Agona Apell
Our guns were still strapped onto our backs, because a gun meant life. Without it there was no life in the LRA. After crossing the water and walking for a long time, there was a whisper in my heart, telling me that if we kept the guns we would get killed.I was learning to listen to this gentle voice that spoke to my heart. This time what was said was hard to accept. I didn't know how I would convince my friends to throw away what seemed to be their last hope. The voice would not leave me alone. It continued to whisper in my ears to drop the guns.
Grace Akallo
A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.
Agona Apell
As the saying goes- “Habit trumps desire”. If you are a writer, you have to be writing. Write everyday. Set targets and meet them. Keep reading, keep learning, keep growing.Do not try to be a person you are not. Great writing is genuine and true. Remember to have the time of your life while at it :-)
Roxanna Aliba Kazibwe
A struggle is fatally injured not so much by the stumbles of its leaders as by their mumbles
Agona Apell
Self-preservation is an enemy of love.
Roxanna Aliba Kazibwe
Gender equality remains meaningless until we consider it to mean that femininity and masculinity, when we consider the full scope of capabilities that they each afford humanity, are of equal value to society. Therefore, women who attempt to act out equality while suppressing their femininity do not prove equality but only the advantage of masculinity.
Agona Apell
The low suffer most the blow of the law
Agona Apell
The law is not an ass but a chameleon in ass skin: it turns deathly black when around blacks and pristine white when around whites
Agona Apell
The further from law you move, the closer to claw you come.
Agona Apell
The highest form of worship is to answer God's prayer.
Agona Apell
The church's primary purpose is not to make America more Christian, but to make American Christians less American and Rwandan Christians less Rwandan. We are no longer Rwandans or Americans, neither Hutu nor Tutsi. If we are in Christ, we have become part of a new creation.
Emmanuel Katongole
The story that the church has been telling for two thousand years is an outrageous tale about a man who was executed by the state but rose up from the dead. The crux of the story isn't that Jesus figured out the right answer to all the questions facing Israel in his day. What makes all the difference is that Jesus defeated the ultimate enemy and got up from the dead.
Emmanuel Katongole
We are called to be strange in the same way that the early Christian communities were strange to the world around them. The community in Antioch brought together Jews and Samaritans, Greeks and Romans, slaves and free, men and women in a way that was so confusing that people didn't know what to call them. So they called them "Christians." The only way they knew to describe their peculiar actions was to say that they were followers of an odd preacher from Galilee. The world is longing for such new and odd communities in our time. . . . I pray the time is now and that the resurrection might begin in us.
Emmanuel Katongole
While reason steers a man, it is faith alone that moves him
Agona Apell
People of great faith are almost always lacking in reason, while people possessed of great reason often suffer from a pitiful lack of faith. So it always happens that people of great faith can move the world but cannot steer it, while people possessed of great reason excel at steering the world but are hopeless at moving it
Agona Apell
I have written this book with the conviction that the response to injury does not have to be vengeance and that we need to distinguish between revenge and justice. A response other than revenge is possible and desirable. For that to happen, however, we need to turn the moment of injury into a moment of freedom, of choice. For Americans, that means turning 9/11 into an opportunity to reflect on America's place in the world. Grief for victims should not obscure the fact that there is no choice without a debate and no democracy without choice.
Mahmood Mamdani
The poet drafts his work as a writer but edits it as a sculptor, with his pen as a chisel and his mind a hammer.
Agona Apell
To be sure, Judas Iscariot was not exactly the sort of character that Christian Mjomba - or anyone else at St. Augustine’s Seminary for that matter - would have wanted to be nicknamed after. But the fact was that Mjomba had never made a secret of his views on the world. Everyone in the seminary brotherhood knew his stand on apartheid and things like that; and they were considered very liberal. In the conservative environment that prevailed at St. Augustine’s Seminary, they were also tantamount to betrayal! It was about the most unsavory that anyone could have wished to be associated with. But that was the label he had got stuck with.tEverybody knew, besides, that it wasn’t some uninformed gentile or misguided unbeliever who had betrayed the Deliverer and handed Him to His killers. And Judas Iscariot wasn’t just anybody either. Judas was one of the twelve who had been handpicked by the Deliverer to form the core of the convocation that would become the Sancta Ecclesia. In addition to being the Deliverer’s purse bearer, Judas Iscariot also drank wine from the same cup as his Master! The man who would betray the Deliverer with a kiss was a member of the inner circle of the burgeoning Christ Fellowship; and, before long, his name had become so repulsive even among Romans, it had replaced that of Brutus, the friend of Cæsar who had conspired with others and stabbed the emperor in the back, as a symbol of betrayal. A traitor par excellence!Whenever Mjomba thought about Judas’ betrayal of the Messiah of the world with a kiss, it was not the act of betrayal itself that came to mind. It was not even the chilling words “Would’st thou betray thy Master with a kiss, Judas?” that were addressed to the betrayer by the Deliverer in the moment when Judas, no doubt representing all humanity, embraced the Nazarene and kissed him on the cheek so the temple’s constabulary wouldn’t grab and take into custody the wrong person! It was the Deliverer’s address to Peter a little earlier on in the Upper House as the fisherman, who himself would swear that he did not know the Nazarene, not once but three times, in front of a shivering crowd not long afterward, balked at the notion of the miracle worker and Son of Man could stoop to wash his (the fisherman’s) dirty feet, namely “Not all are clean, Peter!” And that was, in all probability, after Judas’s feet had already been washed by the Nazarene.That, in any event, was the character after whom Christian Mjomba had been nicknamed by his buddies in what he initially regarded as something that was itself an act of betrayal. The traitors! He could not understand how people could be so insensitive about the feelings of others! And even though he had never said it, he had never liked it a bit - until he started work on his theological thesis."- Joseph M. Luguya, Humans: The Untold Story of Adam and Eve and their Descendants
Joseph M. Luguya
God doesn't want to be a mystery to us, God wants to be known.
Roxanna Aliba Kazibwe
Because we are invited to be part of God's new creation now, we seek to embody the identity we have been given in Christ. . . . We engage in mission to establish friendships that lead to the formation of a new people in the world.
Emmanuel Katongole
The true worth of a man is not seen in the value his money gives him but in the value he gives his money by the uses he puts it to
Agona Apell
Friends are won through personal contact, but admirers are won through their contact with our works
Agona Apell
How long, O God, will we go on with a mock Christianity that takes the tribalism of our world for granted?How long, O God, will we be satisfied with the way things are?How long, O God, will we try to "make some difference in the world" while leaving the basic patterns of the world unaffected?How long, O God will we take consolation in numbers, buildings, and structures, when millions of your children are dying?How long, O Sovereign Lord, will we remain blind to the lessons of history?
Emmanuel Katongole
To the aimless man all men are equal, but to him with purpose some men are seed and others weed
Agona Apell
The rich don't know when they will die, but the world's poor don't know when they will live
Agona Apell
Faith is not mere belief but is that state you attain when you send your will, words, thoughts, beliefs, and actions into orbit around a chosen goal
Agona Apell
The quality of a man is to be judged not by what he drives but by what drives him
Agona Apell
Asking someone to make for you money is like asking them to make for you a baby: they will own the money just as they will own the baby
Agona Apell
Depending on someone to make for you money is quite like depending on them to make for you a baby: they will own the money just as they will own the baby
Agona Apell
There are three houses that the ultimate adult must leave: their parents' house, their employer's house, and their teacher's house. So they must someday found their own home, their own business, and their own school of thought so that they can live under their own roof at home, at work, and in thought.
Agona Apell
The fortune that you feel you don't deserve is heaven's compensation for the misfortunes she feels you didn't deserve
Agona Apell
The experience of the expert is an advantage to them only for as long as it enables them to learn faster than the novice
Agona Apell
Success dwells in a neighbourhood that can only be explored through failure, and it is through perfect knowledge of that neighbourhood that we gain perfect knowledge of her address
Agona Apell
The choice is ours to make whether the stars in the night sky shine upon us as headlights of an approaching paradise or as tail-lights of receding fortunes
Agona Apell
It is through aversion to hardship that great ideas are born, but it is only through acceptance of it that these ideas can be implemented
Agona Apell
You lose nothing if by losing a friend you win countless admirers
Agona Apell
Fortune draws her breath through cracks that make coarse the route on which we march to success
Agona Apell
To be laughed at draws more profitable attention than being smiled at
Agona Apell
Today's troubled homes are made by parents who want to have children but don't want their children to have parents
Agona Apell
The world is fast becoming a corporate caliphate
Agona Apell
Might without right makes blight
Agona Apell
It is only in grammar that the mighty can be bound by rules made by the humble
Agona Apell
There is only one thing worse than a little baby who won't stop crying: it is a big baby who won't stop whining about it
Agona Apell
Her eyes stung from crying for so long and having some tears dry on them. Her body was weak from the exercise but she did not feel better. While she was crying she had wanted someone, anyone to come and hold her. She had crawled into her closet, hoisted herself up onto the shelf that had duvets and bedsheets and curled herself among those. Now she knew that no hug could erase her pain, no sort of embrace could bind up her heart. She needed a new heart it seemed, her old heart was beyond repair.
Roxanna Aliba Kazibwe
The first act in the training of a warrior should be how to string his rifle and turn it into a guitar
Agona Apell
I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.
Agona Apell
It's by stooping that fingers create a fist, and by standing tall that they give us open palms.
Agona Apell
Fortune crowns the bold before the worthy
Agona Apell
It is not courage that makes us speak the truth, but it is a hunger for truth that makes us courageous
Agona Apell