Pakistanis Quotes Page 2

I think we can build democracy in Pakistan.

But it will take time. And it will be a Pakistani democracy. Not one that's imposed by...someone else.

If you ask most Pakistanis, they believe earnestly that Republicans are the best, because they'll give us a lot of money, aide and weapons. The average person forgets that, in return, we have to do the American's dirty work for them.

I had the honor of meeting a young Pakistani woman named Malala Yousafzai, who was shot and nearly killed just for trying to go to school. I also heard about how nearly 300 girls in Nigeria were kidnapped from their school dorms in the middle of the night. There are girls like this in every corner of the globe. In fact, there are more than 62 million girls worldwide not attending school, and that's an outrage.

All one needs to do is just to go to any hospital in America and see the number of Pakistani or Indian or Lebanese, or Syrian, or Egyptian doctors, who are either first generation or themselves immigrants, to know, and I'm a big believer - brains are distributed evenly around the world. What aren't distributed evenly are opportunities, stable government, educational institutions, etc.

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.

If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then, I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.

The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture.

[CIA manipulating] has its roots in internal Pakistani affairs.

It's a horrible development and phenomenon which goes back to radical Islamisation under Zia and taking away the long standing rights of people in the tribal areas [who were left largely alone].

I can understand the idea that there is a conspiracy.

In fact, in much of the world there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense. They [CIA] created a monster and now they are appalled by it.

Historically, several policy domains, including that of foreign policy towards the US and India, budget allocations etc, have been controlled by the Pakistani military, and the civil-military divide can be said to be the most fundamental fracture in Pakistan's body politic.

In India you don't find propaganda against Pakistan.

During the war there was a little of it, naturally, but even during the war we were able to control it. In fact the Pakistanis were astonished by this. There were prisoners in the camp hospitals who exclaimed, 'What? You're a Hindu doctor and you want to cure me?'

It would seem that it was not in the interest of 'someone' for us to make progress. It was in 'someone's' interest that we be always at war, that we tear each other to pieces. Yes, I'm inclined to absolve the Pakistanis. How should they have behaved? Someone encouraged them to attack us, someone gave them weapons to attack us. And they attacked us.

The Indians and Pakistanis are literally brothers.

When you look at the beginning of the actual war, it's not hard to recognize that the Pakistanis were the ones to attack.

The attitude of the Pakistani people is very good.

Whenever I release any statement or deliver any kind of speech, they respond favourably.

I'm sad because I want to bow out of my race and leave my beautiful identity? Chinese love Chinese. They love their little slant eyed, pale brown skinned babies. Pakistanis love their culture.Jewish people love their culture. A lot of Catholics want to marry Catholics because the want their religion to stay the same.

I think in Pakistan there is already democracy and no dictatorship.

And recently a few years ago, the Pakistani people stood against the dictatorship of [Pervez] Musharraf and compelled him to resign. So now it is the people's democracy so I don't think any chance that the people should stand against this administration. Pakistan's situation is different than Egypt. They cannot be compared.

think that the external situation has also changed somewhat.

The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.

As the 'critic of color,' I'm frequently asked to review Indian and Pakistani writers.

Islam in the Arab world coexists with Indonesian, Pakistani and Turkish Islam.

There is limited solidarity, even within the Arab world.

I want people to leave the theater with a greater understanding of the rich cultural heritage of Pakistan. "Song of Lahore" moves beyond headlines and stereotypes and shows that a vast majority of Pakistanis are not perpetrators of religious violence - they are victims of it. The beautiful cultural heritage of the region belies its image in the West as monolithically religious, intolerant, and violent.

Pakistani feature films are all about catering to the male ego and male fantasy.

Making a programme that appears to condone a positive stereotype actually enforces all the negative ones as well. It says that they all have a valid point. To assert that Americans are naive, Germans humourless and the French arrogant is one thing: they're big enough to take it. But to say that there's a conspiracy of Jewish bankers, that gypsies are thieves, Pakistanis are dirty and refugees are muggers is something quite else.

Most liberal-minded folk would like to think that since they are not hostile to people of a different race, racism is a disease of the uneducated, unenlightened and socially backward - football hooligans, British National Party supporters, policemen. You could call this the Bad Guy Theory. But the Bad Guy Theory does not explain why Indian-heritage children do nearly twice as well as Pakistani-heritage children at GCSE.

Moscow has been helping the Northern Alliance because "the Taliban was openly supported by Pakistan... until last week, Pakistani servicemen had taken part in war operations on the Taliban side.

I want to be the first Pakistani, like some of our counterparts in India, to really go out and show that we Pakistanis can even be successful outside Pakistan.

In February I secured permission to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed and where he had lived for the last half-decade of his life; the first, and only, journalist to do so.

We have to deal with this new type of threat in a way we haven’t yet defined.

. . . With a low-probability, high-impact event like this . . . If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.

I am confident Pakistani government will provide me with adequate security, unlike the government at the time that sabotaged my mother's security in Pakistan.

In December 2011, I will be opening up my production house, Sharmeen Obaid Films, and aspire to change the way Pakistanis approach nonfiction storytelling. There are thousands of stories to be found here.

The Pakistani government and its allies must overhaul their policies in Pakistan.

Well, you got to remember, bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and, in some ways, he and his ideology killed tens of thousands of his fellow Muslims, including Pakistanis. I understand that that was provocative and complicated for Pakistan, but only if you accept the idea that he was an acceptable member of Pakistani society.

In Waziristan people get really upset when there are no drone attacks.

Their apprehension is that the US and Pakistani government might enter in an agreement to halt the attacks.

I'm sitting here watching Hannah Montana, so I'm not going to annihilate 4.

3 million Pakistanis without hearing directly from someone whose authority I recognize!

As the bus slowed down at the crowded bus stop, the Pakistani bus conductor leaned from the platform and called out, "Six only!" The bus stopped. He counted on six passengers, rang the bell, and then, as the bus moved off, called to those left behind: "So sorry, plenty of room in my heart - but the bus is full." He left behind a row of smiling faces. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.