They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They probably don't really like pale skin, but they certainly like walking into a store without some security dude following them. Hating Your Go and Eating One Too, as the great Philip Roth put it. So if everyone in America aspires to be WASP's, then what do WASP's aspire to? Does anyone know?

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They tell us race is an invention, that there is no genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroid. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what’s the deal, is race an invention or not?

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Try more strategy and less force. Passion never wins any game, never mind what they say.” He said something similar now: “Excuses don’t win a game. You should try strategy.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak-- a hard man.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We never actively remember death,' Roderigo said. The reason we live as we do is that we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie