Iman Quotes

If I had a choice of educating my daughters or my sons because of opportunity constraints, I would choose to educate my daughters.

One of the biggest development issues in the world is the education of girls. In the United States and Europe, it has been accepted, but not in Africa and the developing countries.

Why am I not feminist? Maybe because I come from a country where my mother ruled my life. I never felt in any way that I couldn't achieve what I want.

Women's issues have always been a part of my life.

We have much participation of women in Afghanistan politics. Yet 86 percent of the women are illiterate. I and the women who come before you are not typical of women in our country.

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.

My college degree is from a great university in 1944. I got my master's at Harvard graduate school, completely co-ed, in 1945. My mother got her college degree in 1920. What's the problem? Those opportunities were always there for women.

My first exposure to sanitation issues occurred when I got admission into an engineering college. They probably didn't want to admit me and informed me that there was no ladies toilet in the college. I was adamant and pursued my studies in engineering in that very college.

I had the honor of meeting a young Pakistani woman named Malala Yousafzai, who was shot and nearly killed just for trying to go to school. I also heard about how nearly 300 girls in Nigeria were kidnapped from their school dorms in the middle of the night. There are girls like this in every corner of the globe. In fact, there are more than 62 million girls worldwide not attending school, and that's an outrage.

I didn't know feminism was actually a thing until I left home and found out the country didn't run the way my mom's house did.

In many developing countries, girls don't go to school. They stay home. They are at the water wells, bringing water back and forth to the village. Or they are doing chores, preparing meals, farming. Some cultures think girls and women shouldn't be educated, and those are very often the places where the treatment of women and girls is the worst.

In the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment.

I was never a feminist because I was never ugly enough for that.

In some of the countries, women are not allowed to even leave the house. And that's something that needs to change. So, raising awareness among both sexes is key to that.

It is impossible to realize our goals while discriminating against half the human race. As study after study has taught us, there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.

The full implications of feminism will evolve over time, as we organize, experiment, think, analyze, and revise our ideas and strategies in light of our experiences. No theory emerges in full detail overnight; the dominant theories of our day have expanded and changed over many decades. That it will take time should not discourage us. That we might fail to pursue our ideas - given the enormous need for them in society today - is unconscionable.

The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.

Lots of men hate women now-a-days. ... It was a man-made world, and now we're asking to go shares in the making.

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.

When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in 1993, his belief in the 'Broken Windows' theory led him to implement the 'Zero Tolerance' crime policy. Crime dropped dramatically, significantly, and continued to for the next ten years. Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Windows issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on 'All The Patriarchal Bullshit'.

I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.

My own feminist revolution evolved slowly, and traveled the world with me. To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist tests on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything. Now that I am older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don't know if you will ever land.

In some extreme cases, women are constrained by what can only be described as pre-Islamic, misogynistic approaches to the role of women in society. That continues to be a challenge.

All women are feminists. Being a feminist is allowing woman to be natural, for what she is, whatever it is. All of us can be natural and we're all feminists in that sense.