Lagos Quotes

Everywhere I go, I see young people: Confident, forward looking. I have seen them in Lagos, in Rwanda, in the suburbs of London. ~ Binyavanga Wainaina

If you're able to grow up in Nigeria and go through certain things, you're able to tackle anything around the world because you're able to live wherever, if you can survive in a city like Lagos or Warri or Niger Delta, as far as I'm concerned. ~ Nneka

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
"He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are
both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had
essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
"But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists
think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the
pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits."
"Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a
language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret."
"The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro
says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only
once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the
information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into
hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out,
but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the
newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and
that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself
accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent
part of the brain's deep ~ Neal Stephenson

Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling, Nneoma said. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

All of them watched the footage, even Fisayo. After it finished, none of them said a word, yet in their minds, they saw plenty. Jacobs saw an end to living with parents who refused to accept him. His sister Fisayo saw all of Lagos in flames. Seven saw infinite possibilities and a people from outer space that could make the world embrace and love everyone. Rome saw the rise of Rome. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

It's important to see how we can advance in healing wounds. ~ Ricardo Lagos

In many parts of the world, you will find people of the
same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar
conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with each
other. This sort of thing is not an oddity -- it is ubiquitous. Many linguists
have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to
fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue?" "Has anyone come up with
an answer yet?"
"The question is difficult and profound," the Librarian says. "Lagos had a
theory."
"Yes?"
"He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a
particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian
language. That prior to Babel Infopocalypse, languages tended to converge. And
that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and
become mutually incomprehensible -- that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled
like a serpent around the human brainstem."
"The only thing that could explain that is --" Hiro stops, not wanting to say
it.
"Yes?" the Librarian says.
"If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their
minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian language anymore.
Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another,
damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the bra ~ Neal Stephenson

Clearly it is better that, when someone is wanted by the international police, and this person travels, and a country knows about it, that country reports the fact. ~ Ricardo Lagos

Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative. ~ Rem Koolhaas

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it. ~ Rem Koolhaas

With reference to viral infections," the Librarian says, "if I may make a fairly blunt, spontaneous cross-reference - something I am coded to do at opportune moments - you may wish to examine herpes simplex, a virus that takes up residence in the nervous system and never leaves. It is capable of carrying new genes into existing neurons and genetically reengineering them. Modern gene therapists use it for this purpose. Lagos thought that herpes simplex might be a modern, benign descendant of Asherah. ~ Neal Stephenson

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business. ~ Teju Cole

Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter. Lagos has always been undisputably itself, but you would never know this at the meeting of the Nigerpolitan Club, a group of returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had never ever been close to being like New York. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My knowledge of Abuja is not as deep as my knowledge of Lagos. ~ Babatunde Fashola

You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won't lick anybody's ass, or they don't know which ass to lick or they don't even know how to lick an ass. I'm lucky to be licking the right ass." She smiled. "It's just luck. Oga said I was well brought up, that I was not like all the Lagos girls who sleep with him on the first night and the next morning give him a list of what they want him to buy. I slept with him on the first night but I did not ask for anything, which was stupid of me now that I think of it, but I did not sleep with him because I wanted something. Ah, this thing called power. I was attracted to him even with his teeth like Dracula. I was attracted to his power. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops ~ Teju Cole

Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency. ~ Rem Koolhaas

As governor of Lagos, I never signed a cheque and never fixed contract prices. ~ Babatunde Fashola

We fully support the strikes against terrorist targets, not against the country, not against the culture, not against a religion, but against an enemy of them all. ~ Ricardo Lagos

Let's not interfere with justice ... Let's let justice speak. ~ Ricardo Lagos

Lagos is a metropolis of almost twenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so people come up with all sorts of ways to make a living. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We need to be more careful, but more compassionate. We must strike, not deal with terrorists, but to broaden our understanding of the world outside our borders. ~ Ricardo Lagos

A White man in Lagos has no voice louder than the dollar sign branded onto his forehead ~ A. Igoni Barrett

The Sumerians wrote on everything.
When they built a building, they would write in cuneiform on every brick. When
the buildings fell down, these bricks would remain, scattered across the desert.
In the Koran, the angels who are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah say, We are
sent forth to a wicked nation, so that we may bring down on them a shower of
clay -- stones marked by your Lord for the destruction of the sinful.' Lagos
found this interesting -- this promiscuous dispersal of information, written on
a medium that lasts forever. He spoke of pollen blowing in the wind -- I gather
that this was some kind of analogy. ~ Neal Stephenson

A great deal of effort has been devoted to explaining Babel. Not the Babel event
-- which most people consider to be a myth -- but the fact that languages tend
to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been developed in an effort to
tie all languages together."
"Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
"Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner
summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of
thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our
perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over
that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of
the evolution of the human mind itself."
"Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the universalists?"
"In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have
anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can
analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in
common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
"Have they found any?"
"No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
"Which blows universalism out of the water."
"Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits
are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
"Which is a cop out."
"Their ~ Neal Stephenson

This is not the Chile we want to build. ~ Ricardo Lagos

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit. ~ Rem Koolhaas

It seems to me that all of us, in our own way, have our own personal lagos. We all have within us a voice that is whispering doubt, that is whispering suspicion, that's telling us there's something wrong, there's something missing, there's something that should be different. And we easily become hypnotized by that voice of doubt. ~ Arjuna Ardagh

Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It's unbelievably unique, but also it's now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Lagos was built from blood and sweat, and raw ambition. Abuja was designed as a playground for the rich. ~ A. Igoni Barrett

We don't always come out unbreakable the first time. So we are broken and rebuilt several times, until there is no question that we can stand on our own ~ Arlene Lagos

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross. ~ Ricardo Lagos