Top 35 Mona Eltahawy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Men cannot sit back and say, ‘Well, I’m not rich and powerful; that’s not me.’ It is you – if you are not actively dismantling the patriarchy, you are factually benefiting from it. Are you uncomfortable? Good. You should be. Discomfort is a reminder that privilege is being questioned, and this revolutionary moment is one in which we must defy, disobey, and disrupt the patriarchy, everywhere.”

— Mona Eltahawy

2. “The battles over women’s bodies can be won only by a revolution of the mind.”

— Mona Eltahawy

3. “I believe it’s the writer’s job to tell society what it pretends it doesn’t know.”

— Mona Eltahawy

4. “To the girls of the Middle East: Be immodest, rebel, disobey, and know you deserve to be free.”

— Mona Eltahawy

5. “They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.”

— Mona Eltahawy

6. “The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.”

— Mona Eltahawy

7. “Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle.”

— Mona Eltahawy

8. “What would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes, whose erruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold, a force not to be trifled with?”

— Mona Eltahawy

9. “I was traumatised into feminism – there’s no other way to describe it.”

— Mona Eltahawy

10. “Freedom is astonishing and breathtaking. Freedom is terrifying when those who insist on that freedom are those whose submission you have been socialized into believing is your bequeathed right.”

— Mona Eltahawy

11. “Why is violence significantly less traumatizing than our naked bodies?”

— Mona Eltahawy

12. “Candy in a wrapper, a diamond ring in a box – these analogies are commonly used in Egypt and other countries to try to convince women of the value of veiling. They compare women to objects that are precious but devalued by exposure, objects that need to be hidden, protected, and secured. When it comes to what are described as the Islamic restrictions on women’s dress, women are never simply women. There.”

— Mona Eltahawy

13. “When Westerners remain silent out of ‘respect’ for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative elements of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.”

— Mona Eltahawy

14. “I do wonder, sometimes, if I had had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. How – when it’s taken me so long to unlearn the things I believe are most damaging to the cause of women’s liberation and equality – would I have raised my daughter to disobey?”

— Mona Eltahawy

15. “The niqab represents a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women. It puts on a pedestal a woman who covers her face, who erases herself, and it considers that erasure the pinnacle of piety.”

— Mona Eltahawy

16. “But it is the job of a revolution to shock, to provoke, and to upset, not to behave or to be polite.”

— Mona Eltahawy

17. “Words are important – the fight silence, alienation, and violence. Words are flags planted on the planets of our beings; they say this is mine, I have fought for it and despite your attempts to silence me, I am still here. Just as important, words help us find each other and overcome the isolation that threatens to overwhelm and to break us. Words say we are here.”

— Mona Eltahawy

18. “Saudi women who support the guardianship system – they sadly exist – are foot soldiers of the patriarchy in the same way that white American women voters who voted for Trump uphold white supremacy and its attendant misogyny. Both groups of women mistakenly believe their proximity to power in their respective countries will protect them from the worst ravages of patriarchy.”

— Mona Eltahawy

19. “Being a woman anywhere is dangerous.”

— Mona Eltahawy

20. “Now that I’m older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don’t know if you’ll ever land.”

— Mona Eltahawy

21. “I am DELIGHTED that I upset you so much.”

— Mona Eltahawy

22. “Why were women alone responsible for sheltering men from the sexual desires women supposedly elicited in men? Why could men not control themselves? Why, if men were the ones being tempted, were they not the ones being policed?”

— Mona Eltahawy

23. “We will have a reckoning with our culture and religion, with military rulers and Islamists – two sides of one coin. Such a reckoning is essentially a feminist one. And it is what will eventually free us. Women – our rage, our tenacity, our daring and audacity – will free our countries.”

— Mona Eltahawy

24. “Patriarchy is so universal and normalized that it is like asking a fish What is water?”

— Mona Eltahawy

25. “Patriarchy refuses to believe that girls and young women can be angry, attention-seeking, profane, ambitious, powerful, violent, and lustful.”

— Mona Eltahawy

26. “What would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes, whose eruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold and a force not to be trifled with? What if instead of breaking their wildness like a rancher tames a bronco, we taught girls the importance and power of being dangerous?”

— Mona Eltahawy

27. “Profanity is an essential tool in disrupting patriarchy and its rules. It is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience.”

— Mona Eltahawy

28. “It is cruel to abandon women and girls to a culture they had no say in ratifying and to a religion they had no say in interpreting, and which in many cases practically demands they worship men: from a male god to their fathers to their husbands – the literal patriarchs.”

— Mona Eltahawy

29. “Christianity preaches the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gospel of Mona presents instead the seven necessary sins women and girls need to employ to defy, disobey, and disrupt the patriarchy: anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust. I call them “sins,” but of course they are not. They are what women and girls are not supposed to be or do or want. They are condemned as “sins” by a patriarchy that demands we acquiesce to, not destroy, its dictates.”

— Mona Eltahawy

30. “Women who do not ask for permission are powerful.”

— Mona Eltahawy

31. “To be “out of touch” with a society in which women have internalized their subjugation is an admirable thing.”

— Mona Eltahawy

32. “Too many religions are patriarchal and imbued with misogyny. Because of this I am often asked how I can be a Muslim feminist. My response is that I am both of Muslim descent and a feminist, and the two identities are not connected. One does not depend on the other.”

— Mona Eltahawy

33. “Patriarchy keeps us terrified, demanding from us an endless supply of patience, passivity, and obedience, as it pathologiezes and snuffs out our justifiable rage.”

— Mona Eltahawy

34. “White supremacy promises white women protection from the imagined danger of men of color in return for their loyalty. But the truth is, women around the world are hurt the most by men they know: current or former partners or relatives. In other words, the greater danger for white women who vote for far-right groups is their own misogynists.”

— Mona Eltahawy

35. “Encouraging white women to see themselves as higher up the ladder – the hierarchy – of oppressions and injustices employed by patriarchy to maintain itself must be seen for the ruse that it is. Those women might be benefitting from proximity to white power, but nothing protects women from patriarchy. We must dismantle the hierarchies that patriarchy uses, not aim to climb our way up its ladder of injustices.”

— Mona Eltahawy

36. “Racism and bigotry are not polite, and I refuse to be polite in my fight against them.”

— Mona Eltahawy

37. “It is revolutionary to say “I count” when patriarchy demands that you must be “modest” and “humble.”

— Mona Eltahawy

38. “It is hard enough to fight patriarchy. That fight is made harder by rules that constantly work against us, goalposts that endlessly shift, and women who sign up to do patriarchy’s bidding. The last remind us that patriarchy is not about men, that feminism is not about “hating men.”

— Mona Eltahawy