I want to just stay focused on my mission. That is to see every girl get the right to education. And I think this is such an important thing that girls get their right to go to school, and we are losing the potential that these young girls have in this region, like Iraq.

I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

Let us become the first generation to decide to be the last that sees empty classrooms, lost childhoods and wasted potential

Education is the best weapon through which we can fight poverty, ignorance and terrorism.

We are stronger than those who oppress us, who seek to silence us. We are stronger than the enemies of education. We are stronger than fear, hatred, violence and poverty.

We realize the importance of light when we see darkness. We realize the importance of our voice when we are silenced. In the same way when we were in Swat, we realized the importance of pens and books when we saw the guns.

If people volunteered in the same way to construct schools or roads or even clear the river of plastic wrappers, by God, Pakistan would become a paradise within a year.