Passionately enjoy life!

Stronger women build stronger nations.

Believe in your passions and act on them.

Living in war is a co- existence with death.

Only 8 percent of peace talks have included women at any level.

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

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

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

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

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

There is never a typical week. I don't think I can live with a typical week.

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

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

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.

Everything is give and take. The solutions are in the middle not in the extremity of the situation.

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

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

I dont want to be someone in my sixties holding on to a group that I created when I was in my twenties.

I don't want to be someone in my sixties holding on to a group that I created when I was in my twenties.

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

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

I believe that there is an urgent need to restructure the discussion of war to include the impact it has on women.

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

Women are not just victims; they are survivors and leaders on the community-level backlines of peace and stability.

No change can come if those who are impacted the most by discrimination are not willing to stand up for themselves.

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.

I believe that leadership acts should be manifested by engaging in external work that can be observed and shared with everyone else.

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

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.

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.

Growing up under Saddam's rule, I witnessed many injustices occurring everyday in my country and yet I could not do anything to prevent them.

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.

The front[line] of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space, guiding missiles toward unseen targets.

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.

War is nothing but a microcosm of peace... it shows you life in a more intense way and that's how I continue to live it... for good or bad reasons.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 couldn't find anyone doing something about the astounding injustices women were experiencing, so I decided to do something myself. I cannot tell you how many people ridiculed my efforts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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