Zainab Salbi Quotes

I by no means intend to simplify the challenges women face in any culture. Women are marginalized in all cultures in my opinion, some in more extreme ways than others.

The injustice is that women continue to be the main target of violence both during wartime and peacetime and yet there is still a lack of a public outrage.

Women are part of peace keeping troops in countries like Liberia.

Leadership is about encouraging women to break their silence and tell their stories to the world.

Changes don't happen in the world by playing it safe, taking risks is the way to change the world.

One year of the world's military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women.

Women in the Arab world have a rich history in their active participation in political change from the Algeria revolution against the French occupation to the most recent revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya among other countries. The question is not their participation. Their question is the incorporation of women's voices fully in the new definitions of the countries where change has happened.

Sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff without knowing where you will land.

It seems to me that violence against women has been tolerated for so long that the world has become numb to it.

Women still need higher political representation and to be included at decision making tables in all issues in order for solutions that relates from peace to food, to health, to basic stability in the world. We cannot continue to marginalize half of the population in the world in finding sustainable solutions that are good for all.

I grew up with injustice and could do nothing about it. But once in America, I had freedom of choice.

I firmly believe today that the only way to stop violence against women is to speak out and refused to be silenced.

From joblessness to lack of education and professional skills to sexual and gender-based violence, women face a multi-faceted oppression.

Like life, peace begins with women. We are the first to forge lines of alliance and collaboration across conflict divides.

I have come to understand that in order to effectively advance women's rights, we need to galvanize a global women's movement.

It is the diversity of views that stems from different experiences and different backgrounds that lead to healthy decision-making and not the unified experiences and unified views.

I don't have a child, so Women for Women is like my child. But I always said I would step down after 20 years. I didn't want to be a 60-year-old woman holding on to something I created when I was 23.

What is happening
in Africa
(& elsewhere)
is because
the men
did not listen
to the women
& the women
did not listen
to the women
either
& because
the people did not listen
to each other
& themselves
& because
nobody listened
to the children
&
the poets.

- Alice Walker

Living in war is a co- existence with death.

Long-term trauma for women who have survived armed conflict is a haunting reminder that health issues and depression can follow decades after the end of war, but women who hope for healing can and do move forward.

Everything can be taken from you in a second, but the human spirit is so strong. War can teach you so much about evil, and so much about good.

Since I was 15 years old I have dedicated my life to serving women.

The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling.

Where has change ever been clean and nice? It has always been messy and painful.

Since war often enters homes through the "kitchen door," we need to understand women's attempts to keep life going in the face of shortage of food, closing of schools and reduced freedoms.

Every woman must own her story; otherwise we are all part of the silence.

Women have never been a chief negotiator in any UN-sponsored talks.

Do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life?

War is not a computer-generated missile striking a digital map. War is the color of earth as it explodes in our faces, the sound of child pleading, the smell of smoke and fear. Women survivors of war are not the single image portrayed on the television screen, but the glue that holds families and countries together. Perhaps by understanding women, and the other side of war ... we will have more humility in our discussions of wars ... perhaps it is time to listen to womens side of history.

Without women's full inclusion at the decision making table, we cannot have any healthy decision making that is good for men and women alike.

Working with women survivors of war has taught me that we need to listen to women's perspectives on war in order to understand how to effectively rebuild a country, a community and a family.

Only 1 in 13 participants in peace negotiations since 1992 has been a woman.

I learned that victims come in all image - some raped, some witnessing an act of violence, some losing loved ones. I learned that the solutions come by both listening to the people impacted by the crisis and by learning from historical experiences in other places.

I find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping, and the group of people who are mostly - though not exclusively - who are keeping life going in the midst of war, are not included in the negotiating table.

My message to the world is that until we recognize that peace is not just the absence of war but the revival of life on the "backlines," where women are keeping kids in school, caring for the sick and injured, and daily negotiating space for the continuation of critical life processes of this nature, we're going to continue to miss the point.

Leadership is not about having the charisma or speaking inspirational words, but about leading with example.

There's a lot of projection that if you're in service then you shouldn't look good. I'm no different from anybody else. I like clothes, I like shoes, I like to go have nice dinners, I like to dance. Just because I've dedicated myself to serving women, why do you think I need to sacrifice myself?