Donna Osmani > Donna's Quotes

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar”
― Abraham Lincoln

“With too much pride a man cannot learn a thing. In and of itself, learning teaches you how foolish you are.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“They were always Albanians. You know what that means. Some Catholics, some Orthodox. And some, in time, were Muslims, too. But the first religion of the Albanian, as they say, is Albania.”
― Jason Goodwin, The Snake Stone

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Më i rrezikshëm është armiku i brendshëm se sa armiku i jashtëm.”
― Inf. Sebahate Sahiti

“Me ka marr malli per Shqiperin, por jo per Shqipetaret.”
― Beta Metani' Marashi

“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal. For example, although we are taught that women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it. Not until the 1960s, through the Voting Rights Act, were all women—regardless of race—granted full access to suffrage. Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging injustice.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists