Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World.

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

I had no words for these feelings. And then people started using the word Ms. Suddenly, there was this handle with which I could identify myself and understand why I felt so out of whack with the culture around me.

Massachusetts women as a rule adhere too strongly to old-time conventions.

Conservatism is affecting the way women perceive who they are in the world.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.

I really think that women should be allowed to be more European, in this country.

Women with money and women in power are two uncomfortable ideas in our society.

We Latin women are liberated from the neck up, not the neck down.

I think a woman gets more if she acts feminine.

In India, at the community level, young men are playing an absolutely essential role in changing the cultural norms and deeply held practices concerning women. They are doing this in a way that not only empowers women and girls, but really empowers the young men as well.

When I hear the words 'Women should be barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen,' I think, 'What. A. Dream.' There are no negative connotations to it.

Culturally, it is commonplace for African women to work.

For women raised in the '70s, high heels can still carry a stigma; they're associated with being stupid, with just wanting to please a man. Other women find them empowering.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

Sexist attitudes—in the United States as well as in India—make it harder for female scholars … to write freely, provocatively, and creatively about subjects that touch the raw nerves of cultural pride, historical memory, and group identity … particularly galling to patriarchal conservatives in India, focusing as it does on feminist undercurrents within Hinduism that undermine the authority of elite, upper-caste, male, and orthodox sections of Hindu society.

[Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

The glorification of sisters, mothers as the selfless Indian women who will do 'agni pariksha' and the one who sees her own betterment only in the betterment of their husbands and fathers, that has to stop. It's very regressive.

How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?

An African man should not do anything called housework or cooking.

When I was younger, we'd stay at stately homes, and at the end of dinner, women would have to leave the table. I used to sit there. I wouldn't leave. I felt England should come out of the Victorian era.

I think, especially growing up in the South, we are taught that women are supposed to be soft, gentle and kind of just goes along with everything and is submissive.

I can guarantee that back in the day, if a woman was left alone and she needed to eat, she would have to hunt. It's not biological imperative that says men have to ask us out; it's social conditioning. And we can change it.

Yes, it's still a man's world, unfortunately, and we have a long way to go in this country and all countries - but there's something to be said for just feeling the spirit of a true man, and I think that's what 'Classic Man' speaks to.