Nawal El Saadawi Quotes

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

Unfortunately, as obsessed as I am with all of those Grimm's slash Disney princesses, I do think women have evolved socially in so many ways.

I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

I think there is some credibility to the notion that marriage is an institution. It meant something very different hundreds of years ago when it became the norm for people to go off and pair.

Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married.

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional framework.

In much the same way Ip Man embodied the struggles of the Chinese people, I wanted Gong Er to represent the changing role of women.

I'm not surprised about the lack of women on boardrooms. They were only emancipated 200 years ago, and historically, men have dominated. I welcome women as long as they qualify for the job.

My father's generation of Saudi men are more liberal than the men of my generation. But with women, it's the opposite.

I think our societies - to certain extent, of course, and to different degrees, but almost with no exception - have always been struggling to come to terms with archaic traditions.

Obviously, over the history of certainly the last 300 years, it was that men went out and worked, and women stayed home. Yes okay, that's the way it was. But certainly it isn't that women weren't able to do it.

All of the Arabic women I grew up listening to or watching had a very strong character.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

The struggles women face today are simultaneously very, very old and very new.

Old ideas die hard. We've had thousands of years of women having almost no rights. Parts of the world are in a struggle toward very basic human rights for women, and most of the world isn't even there yet. And it's going to take a long time to change these attitudes.

The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class.

Honestly, because of the way women were treated, I wouldn't want to go back to Puritan times.

The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

Centuries from now our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back at us with amazement at how we could allow such a precious achievement of human culture as the telling of a story to be shattered into smithereens by commercials, the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors for whom slavery, capital punishment, burning of witches, and the inquisition were acceptable everyday events.

Women didn't have rights. Under British common law, women were property.

Solidarity between women can be a powerful force of change, and can influence future development in ways favourable not only to women but also to men.

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living.