Zainab Salbi
Like life, peace begins with women. We are the first to forge lines of alliance and collaboration across conflict divides.Collection: Peace
Leadership is about encouraging women to break their silence and tell their stories to the world.Collection: Leadership
Being a leader for me is about having the courage to speak the truth, and live the truth, despite attempts to silence our thoughts, feelings, and past experiences.Collection: Courage
Sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff without knowing where you will land.Collection: Motivational
I firmly believe today that the only way to stop violence against women is to speak out and refused to be silenced.Collection: Believe
Leadership is not about having the charisma or speaking inspirational words, but about leading with example.Collection: Example
Every woman must own her story; otherwise we are all part of the silence.Collection: Silence
It seems to me that violence against women has been tolerated for so long that the world has become numb to it.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Men
Women are not just victims; they are survivors and leaders on the community-level backlines of peace and stability.Collection: Community
Changes don't happen in the world by playing it safe, taking risks is the way to change the world.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Country
Stronger women build stronger nations.Collection: Stronger
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.Collection: Target
The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Strong
Everything is give and take. The solutions are in the middle not in the extremity of the situation.Collection: Giving
Living in war is a co- existence with death.Collection: War
It appears easier to talk about protecting women than it is to fully include women at all decision-making levels in peace talks and post-conflict planning.Collection: Decision
As women, we must speak out, speak up, say no to our inheritance of loss and yes to a future of women-led dialogue about women's rights and value.Collection: Loss
Believe in your passions and act on them.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Order
Historically speaking, religious and conservative groups always wanted the control over the private sphere that impacts women most, as reflected by family law and women's access to resources and mobility. And often secular groups traded this for economic incentives and trade.Collection: Religious
Unfortunately, violence against women is not the only injustice women face globally; it is one of the many inequalities that impede the full development of socially excluded women globally.Collection: Development
Only 1 in 13 participants in peace negotiations since 1992 has been a woman.Collection: Negotiation
From an economic perspective, women are treated unfairly: they perform 66 percent of the world's work and produce 50 percent of the food but they only earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property.Collection: Perspective
Women have never been a chief negotiator in any UN-sponsored talks.Collection: Chiefs
Only 8 percent of peace talks have included women at any level.Collection: Levels
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.Collection: Losing A Loved One
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.Collection: Mean
While women may look different, as some wear suits and others wear saris, or some cover their hair while others wear their hair loose, women need to stand together because they all face the central point of discrimination, although the extremity of which may be different from Kigali to Kabul.Collection: Hair
The front[line] of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space, guiding missiles toward unseen targets.Collection: War
When war ends, women are the first to pick up the pieces. Where there is no market place, they go door to door. When homes are destroyed, mothers and daughters haul stones to rebuild or plow fields together.Collection: Daughter
I have come to understand that in order to effectively advance women's rights, we need to galvanize a global women's movement.Collection: Rights
No change can come if those who are impacted the most by discrimination are not willing to stand up for themselves.Collection: Discrimination
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?Collection: Falling In Love
I believe that there is an urgent need to restructure the discussion of war to include the impact it has on women.Collection: War
I believe that leadership acts should be manifested by engaging in external work that can be observed and shared with everyone else.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Children
If half the society isn't engaged on any number of sectors, success and potential will be limited. In that sense, I do definitely believe there is a growing movement and moment for women's issues.Collection: Believe
I dont want to be someone in my sixties holding on to a group that I created when I was in my twenties.Collection: Twenties
Since a very young age, my mother made sure to tell me about the plight of women... As she raised my awareness about women's issues, she also made sure to ingrain in me the importance of being strong and independent and not to let anybody define me by their images of what women should be.Collection: Mother
From joblessness to lack of education and professional skills to sexual and gender-based violence, women face a multi-faceted oppression.Collection: Skills
Passionately enjoy life!Collection: Life
I grew up with injustice and could do nothing about it. But once in America, I had freedom of choice.Collection: America
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.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: Motivation