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"It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't."
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"History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles."

"It reaffirmed my long-held belief that education was the enemy of prejudice. These were men and women of science, and science had no room for racism."

"Trying to educate the dumb with a dumb teacher is nothing but washing the dirty clothes in a dirty water!"

"If my career detour from special education to singing has done one thing, it has afforded me the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others."

"No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process."

"We shall always meet teachers but we shall seldom meet good teachers. We shall seldom meet a good teacher who is good enough to direct the body, mind and soul towards the path of true purposefulness. We shall hardly meet good teachers who are good enough to leave indelible and distinctive footprints in our minds; good teachers whose words, thoughts, actions and wonderful deeds would continue to reecho themselves in our minds and become the yardstick, guiding principles and reasons for the steps we take each moment of time. We shall always meet teachers but, we shall seldom and hardly meet great teachers!"

"I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia."

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government."
Explore more quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"A man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in."

"Talk to her about sex, and start early. It will probably be a bit awkward, but it is necessary."

"There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once."

"Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are the little things, but sometimes it is the little things that sting the most."

"Other men might respond by saying: Okay, this is interesting, but I don't think like that. I don't even think about gender. Maybe not. And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender."

"White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening."

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

"And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it."

"She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child was the exception rather than the rule."

"If the justification for controlling women's bodies were about women themselves, then it would be understandable. If, for example, the reason was 'women should not wear short skirts because they can get cancer if they do.' Instead the reason is not about women, but about men. Women must be 'covered up' to protect men. I find this deeply dehumanizing because it reduces women to mere props used to manage the appetites of men."
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