Nawal El Saadawi Quotes

Women cannot be a part of the Institute of France

The exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours.

During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects.

The women’s movement is at heart revolutionary for it aims at a fundamental reorganization of all forms of human living together, a reorganization that perhaps Social Democracy does not even dream of.

There's nothing bad about feminism. We have to help each other, because there's a lot of women in the world who are suffering because the fact is we're not equal. It's as plain as that. It's still a men's world. I don't know. We'll go on with it.

What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.

Women are suffering because they are being excluded. The high military council excluded women from the committee to change the constitution [of Egypt]. We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.

Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sexand take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

We think it is in our nation's interest that Afghan women - or any women around the world - not suffer.

The abuse of women and girls is the most pervasive and unaddressed human right violation on earth.

Sexism is so five minutes ago. I think for the most part, people accept that women are as competent as men.

Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun." "I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?). I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand: WE WUZ PUSHED.

Woman's rights should come by evolution, and not by revolution. I want a little woman's right tried first, and then, if the experience is bad, we can go back on our track; if good, forward.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it.

I'm 100 percent serious. I've been fighting for equality for women's issues my entire life, in the military included.

They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.

Nobody respects women more than Donald Trump.

There are limits put on women, but why should there be?

A woman's place is in the wrong.

I do sort of appreciate Nelly's [Ternan] view that it would be woman who would suffer mostly from that - who would be ostracized. The rigid societal conventions meant that it was difficult to live outside of them.

I believe that women should have equal rights to education, to work and to civic and political engagement.

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

I've always been very wary of debates involving women.

This year women learned that if we aren't at the table, we're on the menu.