Because my mother couldn't change my present, I decided to change my daughter's future

— Manal Al-Sharif

Freedom is to live with dignity

— Manal Al-Sharif

Gradually, I realized that the ideas I had embraced and defended blindly all my life represented a singular, and highly radical, point of view. I began to question everything.

— Manal Al-Sharif

How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.

— Manal Al-Sharif

How odd it is that we judge a woman by her clothes and the place she eats lunch and the subjects she talks about with her colleague son her coffee break, yet we don’t judge a man if he doesn’t grow his beard or if he works with women or speaks to them. Why do Saudi women allow subjugation to a man and adhere to men’s rules and conditions? Why did I?

— Manal Al-Sharif

I got a text from my husband. “Canal, you are divorced,” it read. “Your papers are in the court of Hobart.” I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.

— Manal Al-Sharif

It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone.

— Manal Al-Sharif

I was lonely, desperate, and angry. At that moment, I truly understood what it meant to be a Saudi woman. It meant being confronted with every possible kind of obstacle and discrimination. It meant being told that if you want to race with men, you’d have to do it with your hands and legs cut off. I started to wish I had been born somewhere—anywhere—else.

— Manal Al-Sharif

My scars teach me that I am stronger than what caused them.

— Manal Al-Sharif

She took my papers, the papers that had followed me from the Hobart police station to jail, and pointed at a place where I was supposed to sign. On the paper there was a line for charges. In the blank space, someone had written “driving while female.

— Manal Al-Sharif