Top 60 Nawal El Saadawi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can’t have anything without women.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

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

— Nawal El Saadawi

4. “If you are creative, you must be dissident.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

5. “Truth is relative, and there is always something missing in truth that prevents it from being perfect.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

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

— Nawal El Saadawi

7. “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

8. “The slogan of the revolution was dignity, social justice, and freedom. You cannot have dignity or social justice or freedom without women.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

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

— Nawal El Saadawi

10. “She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “To me, ‘beauty’ means to be natural, creative, honest – to say the truth.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

15. “When my second husband shouted, ‘Me or your writing!’ I replied, ‘My writing.’ We separated.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

16. “Love has made me a different person. It has made the world beautiful.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

17. “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

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

— Nawal El Saadawi

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “If you do not love yourself, well, you cannot do anything well, that’s my philosophy.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

24. “The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular. There was not a single Islamic slogan. 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.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

25. “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

26. “Who said to kill does not require gentleness?”

— Nawal El Saadawi

27. “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

28. “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

29. “I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die. I want nothing. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. Therefore I am free. For during life it is our wants, our hopes, our fears that enslave us.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

30. “I am very much against makeup and high heels and all that we inherit as ‘beauty.’”

— Nawal El Saadawi

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Fearing servility, people become servile.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

34. “Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

35. “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. Because I was intelligent I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

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

— Nawal El Saadawi

37. “Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

38. “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

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

— Nawal El Saadawi

40. “We see our homeland more clearly when we are away from it than when we are in it.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

41. “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

42. “For truth and death are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them. And truth is like death in that it kills. When I killed I did it with truth not with a knife. That is why they are afraid and in a hurry to execute me. They do not fear my knife. It is my truth that frightens them.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Biarkan aku mati dalam pelukanmu dan jangan kausela aku.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

46. “I wanted a perfect man like the one in my imagination and a perfect love and I wasn’t going to abandon either of these goals, however long it meant I had to be alone. ‘All or nothing’ was my abiding principle and I’d never accept half measures.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

47. “Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.”

— Nawal El Saadawi

48. “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

49. “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

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

— Nawal El Saadawi