Democracy opens new vistas and opportunities. We should use the opportunities it offers to correct past mistakes not to blunder anew.

Debate and divergence of views can only enrich our history and culture.

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

The work of Nigeria is not complete for as long as there is any one Nigerian who goes to bed on empty stomach.

A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.

But no nation can base its survival and development on luck and prayers alone while its leadership fritters away every available opportunity for success and concrete achievement.

Each one of us, and, indeed, all those who aspire to national leadership must bring their own visions, views and styles to the business of reforming Nigeria, and the search for solutions.

Most importantly, nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.

Even now, we make no apologies for the choice we made. The sacrifices we made were selfless. The options we offered were patriotic while the paths we chose were well thought out.

If you ask me to summarise our mission, I would put it this way: We were a military regime that sought to lay the foundations for freedom and liberty in a complex society.

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

Against stupidity

If there's no relationship with a father who's absent, nobody talks about it.

There are people who are younger than I who are more uptight than I am. It's not necessarily an age thing. I mean nobody is offering me 20-year old leads any more.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses.

Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply.

I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.

In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.

We need a legal code that develops like our skin during our growing years. Something both youthful and strong... So what we humans birth might surpass without oppressing us.

Hillary Clinton doesn't give anybody anything. With Hillary Clinton it's all incoming. There's no outgoing, there's no outflow with Hillary Clinton.

I interview every employeeand I have 3000 employees. It's an obsessive sickness.