Nawal El Saadawi famous quotes

She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Want

Home to me is the world because my books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Book #Home #World

If you are creative, you must be dissident.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Creative

Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Integrity #Men #Our World

Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Fall #Blow #Men

Man ... put himself in a tight corner when he decided that woman was innately passive.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Men #Passive

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.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Powerful #Men #Way

All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Men #Hands #Desire

Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Lying #World #Danger

You poor, deluded woman...do you believe there is any such thing as love?...You're living an illusion. Do you believe the words of love they whisper in the ears of penniless women like us?
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Love You #Believe #Ears

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#World #Unjust

Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Important

I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Motivational #Honesty #Lying

Many people come here and they think my apartment is a poor relative to my name. But you cannot be radical and have money, it’s impossible.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Thinking #Names #People

To me, 'beauty' means to be natural, creative, honest - to say the truth.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Mean #Creative #Honest

There is a proverb that says, ‘Talk so that I may know who you are.’ But I say, ‘Show me your eyes and I will know who you are.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Eye #May #Show Me

Who said to kill does not require gentleness?
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Doe #Said #Gentleness

Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Memories #Writing #Missing

In history, the millions win; that is democracy.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Winning #Democracy

Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Children #Father #Rain

I am becoming more radical with age. I have noticed that writers, when they are old, become milder. But for me it is the opposite. Age makes me more angry.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Opposites #Age #Becoming

My three husbands were afraid of me. I am a very powerful woman.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Powerful #Husband #Three

Thus, after a period of about two thousand years the greatest crime became to worship a god other than the God of Moses, whereas injustice became a minor sin. I began to ask myself how this change had come about. Was it linked to a new order in which the female goddesses had been replaced by one male god?
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Order #Years #Two

War criminals in the U.S. and Israel are not punished: no international court has the courage to put them on trial.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#War #Israel #Trials

What makes revolutionary thought unique is its clarity and dignity, and its clear grasp of freedom and justice: simple, clear words that are understood without the need for any help from elite writers or thinkers.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Unique #Simple #Justice

We here in Egypt are fed up with U.S. colonialism.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Egypt #Colonialism #Feds

Unity is power; without unity women cannot fight for their rights anywhere.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Fighting #Rights #Unity

The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Feminist #Boat #Realizing

When you are intelligent and beautiful you face a lot of problems. If you are beautiful and stupid then it's easy.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Beautiful #Stupid #Intelligent

Prostitution means sexual intercourse between a man and a woman aimed at satisfying the man's sexual and the woman's economic needs. It is obvious that sexual needs, even in a male dominated system, are not as urgent and important as economic needs which, if not satisfied, lead to disease and death. Yet society considers the woman's economic need as less vital than the man's sexual one.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Mean #Men #Important

The trilogy composed of politics, religion and sex is the most sensitive of all issues in any society.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Sex #Issues #Religion

The tracing of a child's lineage and its name with reference to the father, though it has lasted for many thousands of years, has not become any the more natural or reasonable as a result.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Children #Father #Years

moral codes and standards in our societies very rarely apply to all people equally. This is the most damning proof of how immoral such codes and standards really are.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#People #Our Society #Morality

Fearing servility, people become servile.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#People #Servility

We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Reality #World #Shapes

I am very much against makeup and high heels and all that we inherit as 'beauty.'
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Makeup #High Heels #Heels

If you do not love yourself, well, you cannot do anything well, that's my philosophy.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Philosophy #Love You #Love Yourself

My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite is deadly.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Heart #Skins #My Heart

Something I tried to hold onto, to touch if only for a moment, but it slipped away from me like the air, like an illusion, or a dream that floats away and is lost. I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now; a loss I was experiencing for the first time, and not something I had lost a long time ago.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Dream #Sleep #Loss

Love has made me a different person. It has made the world beautiful.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Love #Beautiful #World

Interviewer: What would you say to a woman in this country who assumes she is no longer oppressed, who believes women's liberation has been achieved? el Saadawi: Well I would think she is blind. Like many people who are blind to gender problems, to class problems, to international problems. She's blind to what's happening to her.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Country #Believe #Thinking

The family code in Egypt is one of the worst family codes in the Arab world. Polygamy. The husband is having absolute power over the family.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Husband #Egypt #World

What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion, but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Rights #Class #Rereading

I knew I hated him as only a woman can hate a man, as only a slave can hate his master.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Hate #Men #Slave

Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#People #Life Is #Harder

But I feel that you, in particular, are a person who cannot live without love." "Yet I am living without love." "Then you are either living a lie or not living at all.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Lying #Living A Lie #Feels

They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.” I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Independent #Savages #Truth Is

Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Men #Different #Return

I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Life And Death #Desire

Language, journalism, food, sex. All is politics. Even innocent love stories are politics. ... There is no such thing as neutrality.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Sex #Stories #Neutrality

To have arrived at the truth means that one no longer fears death. For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Truth #Mean #Wish

Truth is relative, and there is always something missing in truth that prevents it from being perfect.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Truth #Perfect #Missing

You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Doctors #Creative #Looks

Home is where you are appreciated, safe and protected, creative, and where you are loved - not where you are put in prison.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Home #Creative #Safe

To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Art #Mean #Creative

Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Children #Military #Dark

Home to me is the world because my books have been translated into more than 30 languages. People feel they know me and the minute they talk about my life or books I feel at home. Home is where you are appreciated, safe and protected, creative, and where you are loved – not where you are put in prison.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Book #Home #People

Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the ***** was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Egypt #Circumcision #Culture

Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Doubt #Firsts #Steps

Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Hurt #Pain #Years

When my second husband shouted, 'Me or your writing!' I replied, 'My writing.' We separated.
-- Nawal El Saadawi

#Husband #Writing