My mother named me after a miracle of nature: Waris means desert flower. The desert flower blooms in a barren environment where few living things can survive.

Women’s loyalty has to be earned with trust and affection, rather than barbaric rituals. The time has come to leave the old ways of suffering behind

Because women and girls are not valued equally as human beings, they are treated as less than such. Female genital mutilation is one example of this that has to be stopped.

Every day, women move mountains. It is an insult to have an international women's day.

Give love and share happiness with the people around you, and never give up fighting for what you believe in.

I love the truth. Tell the truth and live the truth, because we've seen enough lies and look what it's doing.

I always knew, from the very day of my own mutilation, that I would one day fight against this practice. I did not know how and when, but I knew that I would fight it.

I know what I am fighting for. I am fighting for the most basic rights of innocent children. And that is why I never take the criticism too deep under my skin.

We need to empower women: provide them with work for their own income, and teach them to become independent of men so they will never have to have their children suffering the same torture.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

Don’t do to your daughters what has been done to you! They are perfect and beautiful.

Let us be appreciative and grateful for the abundance, beauty, experience, and bliss of life.

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.

There’s great beauty on this world if you just have the eyes to see it.

From the physician and lawyer keep not the truth hidden.

Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?

What are you going to do with your freedom?

It was stressful [to live as a child in a Sylvian Hills]. It's always been complicated, honestly... I do not really want to tell you, actually. It bothers me that you want me to tell this.

I wanted to distance myself from those pasty faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I was going to become a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.