Nawal El Saadawi quotes

Nawal El Saadawi was an Egyptian writer, physician, and feminist activist renowned for her work on women's rights in the Arab world. Her writings and advocacy confronted social and political taboos, addressing issues like female genital mutilation and gender oppression. She remains an influential figure in the global feminist movement and a voice for social justice. Here are 24 of her quotes:

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

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

When you have increasing power of religious groups, oppression of women increases. Women are oppressed in all religions.

Nawal El Saadawi

Unity is power; without unity women cannot fight for their rights anywhere.

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.

Nawal El Saadawi

Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.

Nawal El Saadawi

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

Nawal El Saadawi

Women in most countries have not achieved much, because they can't be liberated under the patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist and military system that determines the way we live now, and which is governed by power, not justice, by false democracy, not real freedom.

Nawal El Saadawi

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

Nawal El Saadawi

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

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

Nawal El Saadawi

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

Nawal El Saadawi

We here in Egypt are fed up with U.S. colonialism.

Nawal El Saadawi

In history, the millions win; that is democracy.

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.

Nawal El Saadawi

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

Nawal El Saadawi

I'm surrounded by young people, day and night. Thousands of them. The government is afraid of the young, and they won't touch me because they know I have the power of the young people behind me.

Nawal El Saadawi

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

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

Nawal El Saadawi

The hijab has nothing to do with moral values. A woman's moral values are reflected in her eyes, in the way she talks, and in the way she walks. They put on a hijab and go dancing, wearing high heels and lipstick. They wear tight jeans that show their bellies.

Nawal El Saadawi

...Nobody can help anybody. Nobody can help us in Egypt-we did our revolution alone, we liberated ourselves alone. I don't believe in charity or "helping.” I believe in the equal exchange of ideas, and networking.

Nawal El Saadawi