Quotes on Pakistan

Throughout my career, from Jamaica to Nigeria, Pakistan to Switzerland, I've learned that effective diplomacy means more than shaking hands and staging photo ops. It means developing real, robust relationships. It means finding common ground and managing points of differentiation. It means doing genuine, old-fashioned, people-to-people diplomacy.

Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

I hope that one day when I'll go back to Pakistan, I will build a university like Harvard.

When the forces are aligning against hybridity, it harms everyone, as we are all migrants. Growing up in Pakistan, I know just how oppressive that kind of puritanical mindset can be.

No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men.

We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We see no military - we seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can.

If Pakistan has any ideas of annexing any part of our territories by force, she should think afresh. I want to state categorically that force will be met with force and aggression against us will never be allowed to succeed.

Come forward as servants of Islam, organise the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody.

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.

There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.

Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.

Remember...this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas...This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.

The next few months are critical to Pakistan's future direction as a democratic state committed to promoting peace, fighting terrorism and working for social justice.

There have always been difficult situations for activists in Pakistan. In the 1960s, people fought for linguistic and ethnic rights in relation to the Bangladesh movement and the struggle of the people in the western Balochistan province.

We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

I believe that democracies do not go to war; that's the lesson of history, and I think that a democratic Pakistan is the world community's best guarantee of stability in Asia.

We are so resilient as a people. I have so much respect for their dignity and courage. I hope the world sees this side of Pakistan, one where professionals want a democracy. The spirit of our intelligentsia cannot be broken.

In 1986, Pakistan got the blasphemy law. So, while we had just two cases of blasphemy before that year, now we have thousands. It shows that one should be careful while bringing religion into legislation, because the law itself can become an instrument of persecution.

In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen, but we don't live in a sane world.

Whatever understanding is reached with Pakistan has to be followed honestly, and everybody will have to rise above party politics and be actively committed to make India prosperous.