749 Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women: Is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men.

And when, all those years ago, I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.

I must have been an annoying child.

Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.

I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.

Some people ask, 'Why the word 'feminist'? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?' Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general - but to choose to use the vague expression 'human rights' is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender.

For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed.

I don't think it's a good thing to talk about women's issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don't think that's true.

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.