“Given the right to a free ballot, the people would support my return.”

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.

All our problems, all our disputes, all our disagreements can be resolved quickly to mutual satisfaction if we address the question.

New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.

All we can control in this silly and wildly perfect life is the love that we choose to give out without any regard to ever getting it back in return.

Do you think it possible that some people are born to give more love than they will ever get back in return?

It always comes back to you, when I turn away you’re in my rear view; life twists and turns arriving at pastures new, but still it always comes back to you.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

The craving for ‘the return of the day’, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.

Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.