I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn't know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn't do that in Pakistan - you'd be thrown in prison.

Freedom is not an end. Freedom is a beginning.

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a good example of how people, who are robbed of their right to vote, can protest and put an end to dictatorship.

Right now, they feel they have lost their voice, and their miseries have increased since my departure.

I know death comes. I've seen too much death, young death.

Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

I found that a whole series of people opposed me simply on the grounds that I was a woman. The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man's place in the Islamic society.