Best 83 quotes of Nawal El Saadawi on MyQuotes

Nawal El Saadawi

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    All revolutions in history have obstacles. There is not a revolution that succes.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    All revolutions in history have obstacles.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    Fearing servility, people become servile.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    First of all, I hated the medical profession. Medical education in Egypt was taken from the British, French, colonial educational system. And it's very, very lacking - there is no sexology. I never read the word clitoris in any medical book when I was educated.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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 clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

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

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

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

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    If you are creative, you must be dissident.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

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

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    I had to educate myself about female circumcision, about the clitoris, about sexology. We studied gynecology only. Pregnancy, maternal care, etc.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

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

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    Nawal El Saadawi

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

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    I never stopped writing. I started writing when I was twelve years of age. And I was writing all the time. But nothing was translated until thirty years after I started writing, when The Hidden Face of Eve was translated in 1980.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    In history, the millions win; that is democracy.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    I practiced medicine up 'til now. I practice psychiatry. I shifted from different specialties. I started as a village doctor - community doctor, public health preventive medicine.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    I've lived here [in Egypt] among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia. The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    I've lived in Egypt among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    I was inspired by my life. I was inspired by the lives of many women doctors around me. So [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor ] is a mixture.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

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

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    Nawal El Saadawi

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

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite is deadly.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    My three husbands were afraid of me. I am a very powerful woman.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    People like [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], whether young people, young women, even critics - male critics - they were not shocked by it. Of course, some parts were cut.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    The medical profession [in Egypt] is also very commercial. Health is not given to the poor. You know, if you have money, you have medical care; if you do not, then you are in trouble. I was not ready at all to build my economic security on the diseases of people, on suffering, especially of women and children. So, in a way, I rebelled against it.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    The parts in which I elaborated on the sexual life of the doctor herself, the personal life, her relation with men [in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor]. All this. They left only some very, very minute parts. And also the political, the political element in it. So in a way, they cut pieces that to my mind were very important.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    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.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    There is not a revolution that succe Saudi Arabia paid $7 billion for the Salafists to come, and the United States and Israel are pouring a lot of money into Egypt. Why? To divide the country by religion.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    There is not a revolution that succeeded in a few months. It takes years, even decades, to fulfill its goals. I am very hopeful because I trust the revolution and feel nobody can really conquer a nation that has decided to be united and to fight, and we decided to fight. The revolution is there, inside the Egyptians by the millions.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    There is not a revolution that succe Women are suffering because they are being excluded. The high military council excluded women from the committee to change the constitution.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    There is not a revolution that succe Women were everywhere in the revolution. Women participated in it, and many women were killed.

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    Nawal El Saadawi

    There was not a single Islamic slogan [in Egypt]. It was secular men and women, and in fact, they were unified. Now they want to divide the revolution, and religion is a very strong weapon.