749 Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them . But the reverse is not the same.

[And we do a great] disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males.

We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a 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.

It is easy to say, "But women can just say no to all this." But the reality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.

We make [girls] feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think.

I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up.

[He] looked at me and said, "You know, you're a feminist."It was note compliment. I could tell from his tone - the same tone with which a person would say, "You're a supporter of terrorism.

And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men.