“Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism.”

I’m not into smoke-filled rooms. I don’t have the time for byzantine political intrigues.

Freedom is not an end. Freedom is a beginning.

We learned at an early age that it was men’s interpretation of our religion that restricted women’s opportunities, not our religion itself. Islam in fact had been quite progressive toward women from its inception.

America’s greatest contribution to the world is its concept of democracy, its concept of freedom, freedom of action, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.

The next decade cannot be a decade of confrontation and contention. It cannot be east vs. West. It cannot be men vs. women. It cannot be Islam vs. Christianity. That is what the enemies of dialogue want.

I seek to lead a democratic Pakistan which is free from the yoke of military dictatorship and that will cease to be a haven, the very petri dish of international terrorism.

Military dictatorship is born from the power of the gun, and so it undermines the concept of the rule of law and gives birth to a culture of might, a culture of weapons, violence and intolerance.

I am planning to return and contest the October elections in Pakistan.

I’ve never had a bank account in Switzerland since 1984. Why would the Swiss do this to me? Maybe the Swiss are trying to divert attention from the Holocaust gold scandal.

Our people are dying, poverty and unemployment are on the rise, but the rest of the world says that Musharraf is needed because [only] he can stop nuclear proliferation, [only] he [can launch] an operation in the tribal areas.

To make peace, one must be an uncompromising leader. To make peace, one must also embody compromise.

I was brought up to believe that human beings are good, which is why it shocks me to the core when I see human beings behaving badly.

I found that a whole series of people opposed me simply on the grounds that I was a woman.

Pakistans future viability, stability and security lie in empowering its people and building political institutions.

Being in jail is difficult too because it’s like being in a graveyard, you can’t do much.

I find that whenever I am in power, or my father was in power, somehow good things happen. The economy picks up, we have good rains, water comes, people have crops. I think the reason this happens is that we want to give love and we receive love.

Democracy needs support and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies. Democratic nations should come together in an association designed to help each other and promote what is a universal value – democracy.

Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies.

Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.