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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
221 quotes
“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On We should all be feminists TEDxEutson (December 2012)
“No matter who we are, we dream.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Nigeria I'm not black ... We don't do race in Nigeria. We do ethnicity a lot, but not race. My friends here don't really get it. Some of them sound like white Southerners from 1940. They say, "Why are black people complaining about race? Racism doesn't exist!' It's just not a part of their existence.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how views of race differ in Nigeria than the United States in "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'I Wanted To Claim My Own Name'" Vogue (November 3, 2015)
“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t think sexism is worse than racism, it’s impossible even to compare ... It’s that I feel lonely in my fight against sexism, in a way that I don’t feel in my fight against racism. My friends, my family, they get racism, they get it. The people I’m close to who are not black get it. But I find that with sexism you are constantly having to explain, justify, convince, make a case for.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On why sexism is at times a more difficult argument for her than racism in "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'This could be the beginning of a revolution'" The Guardian (April 28, 2018)
“I don’t think I’m more inherently likely to do domestic work, or childcare ... It doesn’t come pre-programmed in your vagina, right?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how she views gender as a social construct in "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'This could be the beginning of a revolution'" The Guardian (April 28, 2018)
“Because we write fiction we mine our souls. Of course you put yourself into your fiction, your fiction is you.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the connection between the personal and fictional world in "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'This could be the beginning of a revolution'" The Guardian (April 28, 2018)
“This is the kind of capitalism I hate. This is bullying capitalism. Look, I am Igbo, I come from a trading culture. My people are merchant and I'm all for buying and selling. But capitalism has to be a fair exchange.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Is There Anything Else I Can Help You with Today?" Paris Review (28 January 2019)
“Feminism is not that men and women are the same. If men and women are the same, we won't have sexism. We are just stating the differences and people should stop giving negative value to all the attributes that women have. It's not that men and women are the same but they're equally human.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "I want to say what I think" (9 December 2021)
“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We should all be feminists" During a Ted Talk in the United Kingdom at TedxEuston,2012.
“I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high-heels for herself but not for men.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Gender is not an easy conversation to have. For both men and women, to bring up gender, sometimes encounters almost immediate resistance.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“If a man is getting ready for a business meeting he doesn't worry about looking too masculine and therefore not being taken for granted. If a woman is getting ready for business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine, and what it says and whether or not she will be taken seriously.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“I actually learned quite a bit about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“The best feminist I know is my brother Kenny. He's also a kind, good-looking, lovely man, and he's very masculine. Thank you.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“We use the word "respect" to mean something a woman shows a man but often not something a man shows a woman.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“I am a feminist. And when I looked up the word in the dictionary that day, this is what it said: Feminist, a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“censorship very often does not achieve its objective. My first instinct, on learning that a book has been banned, is to seek it out and read it”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Reith Lectures 2022: The Four Freedoms
“The sad truth is that when it comes to appearance we start off with man as the standard, as the norm.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender? What if in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“The men and women are different. We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities, women can have babies, men can't. At least not yet. Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world. But we can change that.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“We teach girls shame. Close your legs, Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“There are writers, like Rushdie, who want to write novels about sensitive subjects but are held back by the spectre of social censure.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Reith Lectures 2022: The Four Freedoms
“The answer to bad speech is more speech.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Reith Lectures 2022
“Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how, you know, female apes bow down to male apes and that sort of thing”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“They grow up to be women who cannot see what they truly think, and they grow up - and this is the worst thing we do to girls - they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“I have beautiful twin nieces who are fifteen and live in Lagos. If they had been born a hundred years ago they would have been taken away and killed. Because it was our culture, it was our culture to kill twins.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“a feminist is a man or a woman who says "Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Men rule the world, and this made sense a thousand years ago, because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“I was going to say that maybe women are born with a cooking gene, until I remember that the majority of the famous cooks in the world, whom we give the fancy title of "chefs," are men.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“I'm trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up. But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“The first time I taught a writing class in graduate school I was worried. I wasn't worried about the material I would teach because I was well-prepared and I was going to teach what I enjoyed teaching. Instead, I was worried about what to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female I will automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried if I looked too feminine I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. Instead, I wore a very serious, very manly, and very ugly suit.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person, it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person, and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved; but it seems to me that our ideas of gender have not evolved.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in our traditions, in the knowledge of our ancestral lands. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, I cannot go to their meetings, I cannot have a say, because I am female. Culture does not make people, people make culture.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Today women in general are more likely to do the house work than men, the cooking and cleaning.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Bottom power means that a woman simply has a good root to tap into, from time to time, somebody else's power. And then of course we have to wonder what happens when that somebody else is in a bad mood, or sick, or impotent.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know that waiters don't intend any harm. But it's one thing to know intellectually and quite another to feel it emotionally.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“In this age of mounting disinformation all over the world, when it is easy to dress up a lie so nicely that it starts to take on the glow of truth, the solution is not to hide the lie but to expose it, and scrub from it its false glow”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Reith Lectures 2022
“So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Cooking, by the way, is a very useful skill for a boy to have. I've never thought it made sense to leave such a crucial thing, the ability to nourish oneself, in the hands of others.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends. But our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations. Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling process.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“There are many people in Western democracies today who will not speak loudly about issues they care about because they are afraid of what I will call, ‘social censure’ – vicious retaliation, not from the government, but from other citizens.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Reith Lectures 2022: The Four Freedoms
“The problem with gender, is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013
“We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian speak, "hard man!”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Should All Be Feminists - April 12, 2013