Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

We were quite a middle class family, but we had access to all the good things in life, be it books or access to a club. I was outgoing and did a lot of elocution, singing and theatre.

I grew up upper middle class.

being in the middle class is a feeling as well as an income level.

I'm just a public-schoolboy. I've got a degree. I'm from a middle-class family in Devon. I've got no story.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

Women like signs of money and education - things that indicate that not only is this guy going to have some resources, but he's also willing to share them.

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

Women are taught that if you want to be a lady, keep your opinions to yourself and be polite.

I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable or silly or camp.

You're looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

I'm fortunate enough not to be poor, and I'm not a bad tipper.

I didn't come from a trailer park. I grew up middle class and my dad had money and my mom made my lunch. I got a car when I was sixteen. I'm proud of that.

I never have issues in handling the fame. I was in a boarding school, as I am from a middle-class family. We didn't have a lot of money, so we all learned to respect money and understood its real value.

I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

I learned early that class is universally admired.

'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.