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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.