Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.

Rushing to judgment. Looking for the bad in someone else before anything else.

inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can't solve in other ways.

Impatience. My mind moves rapidly.

All over the world, girls are raised to be make themselves likeable, to twist themselves into shapes that suit other people. Please do not twist yourself into shapes to please. Don’t do it. If someone likes that version of you, that version of you that is false and holds back, then they actually just like that twisted shape, and not you.

But after one year of medical school I fled. I realized I would be a very unhappy doctor and I really did not want to be responsible for the inadvertent death of my patients. Leaving medical school was a very unusual decision, especially in Nigeria where it is very difficult to get into medical school. Later, people told me that it had been very courageous of me, but I did not feel courageous at all. What I felt then was not courage but a desire to make an effort. To try.

To get this prize, I was required to talk about how important a particular European feminist woman writer had been to me. Now the truth was that I had never managed to finish this feminist writer’s book. It did not speak to me. It would have been a lie to claim that she had any major influence on my thinking. […] I could have said that this woman was important to me, and I could have talked the talk, and I could have been given the prize and a shiny present. But I didn’t.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, because I imagine it to be what the thoughtful American right reads.

I also knew that victimhood is not a virtue. That being discriminated against does not make you somehow morally better.