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If you are creative, you must be dissident.

Nawal El Saadawi

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Nawal El Saadawi
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 27
Died: 2021
Died: March 21
Feminist
Gynaecologist
Novelist
Physician
Physician Writer
Politician
Psychiatrist
Writer
Nawal el-Saadaoui
Nawal al Sadaawi
Nawal Saadawi
Nawal as-Saadawi
Nawäl as-Saʿdāwi
Must
Dissident
Dissidents
Creative

More quotes by Nawal El Saadawi

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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.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Fearing servility, people become servile.
Nawal El Saadawi
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They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.” I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.
Nawal El Saadawi
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In history, the millions win that is democracy.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Love has made me a different person. It has made the world beautiful.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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
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Who said to kill does not require gentleness?
Nawal El Saadawi
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You cannot have dignity or social justice or freedom without women.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Woman at Point Zero I wrote during the '70s in Arabic. It came in English in '82. So, almost ten years' difference between the Arabic and the English.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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
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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
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Women were everywhere in the revolution. Women participated in it, and many women were killed. Then we had the right to speak up and gain some more rights, but what happened was there was a backlash. Why? Because we have the Salafists, Muslim Brothers, religious groups.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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
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Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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
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If you do not love yourself, well, you cannot do anything well, that's my philosophy.
Nawal El Saadawi
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We see our homeland more clearly when we are away from it than when we are in it.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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.
Nawal El Saadawi
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She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.
Nawal El Saadawi