Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out no!

Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.

The fundamentalists are increasing. People, afraid to oppose those fundamentalists, shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion, which is the source of fundamentalism.

Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out no!

I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.

Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?

Women are oppressed in the east, in the west, in the south, in the north. Women are oppressed inside, outside home, a woman is oppressed in religion, she is oppressed outside religion.

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

Among all the 'awards' that I have hitherto collected, I consider the title of 'patita' or 'fallen woman' to be the highest. This is an achievement of my long-struggling life as a writer and as a woman.

I am not scared of anyone. I will write and publish my books.

I believe in absolute freedom of expression. Everyone has a right to offend and be offended.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

I have had fatwas issued against me, some three in Bangladesh and another five in India. I will not be cowed by these threats and shall fight for my rights.

I have lectured at the U.N. and travelled widely, giving lectures on human rights and gender inequalities in universities. But this is a life I do not wish to live. I don't want to be a showcase, I want to be in a battlefield where I can stand beside the oppressed and the poor.

I studied in a medical college and qualified myself as a medical graduate.

I want to live in Kolkata; I don't want to live in Europe - I can't write there. I write in Bengali, and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture.

I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges.

I was well acquainted with the Calcutta literary circle since I was 17, when I lived in Bangladesh and published and edited a little magazine called 'Sejuti,' for which young poets from both Bengals wrote. If you look at my life, there is no question of using anyone for anything. I have only got banned, blacklisted and banished.

In traditional societies, we have a long legacy of men controlling the body and mind of women. Such societies have valorised motherhood and fabricated concepts like chastity. Women have been the victims of these notions for thousands of years.

It is unfair to label me anti-Islam. I am an atheist and a secular humanist.

Religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh have always argued for a ban on my books.

Sheikh Hasina's government is one of the best Bangladesh has ever had. She is taking action against fundamentalists. But even she refused to let me return. I don't think I can ever return home.

The focus of my research is how secular movements originated in West Asian countries and subsequently changed to pan-Islamic movements. The role of Western countries in this aspect is also a part of the research.

When Bangladesh refused to renew my passport, I used U.N. travel documents. You can't disown your country.

When I write, I don't allow the fear of consequences to interfere with the writing process. I have in the past paid for my commitment to the truth and the way I live my life. I am prepared to pay more if I have to.

The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.

If it weren't for women, men would still be wearing last week's socks.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

To a smart girl men are no problem - they're the answer.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Athletes as role models and heroes is a hoax, a sick hoax. The men and women who are fighting in Iraq, they are the true heroes.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

When women go wrong, men go right after them.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

To enable men to exercise that power is the object of protection.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

The laws were not made so much for the direction of good men, as to circumscribe the bad.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform - They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.