Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai S.St is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. She is known mainly for human rights advocacy for education and for women in her native Swat Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Yousafzai's advocacy has since grown into an international movement...
NationalityPakistani
ProfessionCivil Rights Leader
Date of Birth12 July 1997
CityMingora, Pakistan
CountryPakistan
Many girls do not go to school because of poverty.
I will only miss school for an engagement if it is going to bring real change.
Girls are going to school again in Swat Valley. And that is great.
Some girls cannot go to school because of the child labor and child trafficking.
Some parents do not send their children to school because they don't know its importance at all.
I discovered Deborah Ellis's books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy.
I've always been a daydreamer, and sometimes in lessons my mind would drift and I'd imagine that on the way home a terrorist might jump out and shoot me on those steps. I wondered what I would do. Maybe I'd take off my shoes and hit him, but then I'd think if I did that there would be no difference between me and a terrorist. It would be better to plead, 'OK, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I'm not against you personally, I just want every girl to go to school.'
The best way to fight terrorism is not through guns. It's through pens, books, teachers and schools.
It is not time to tell the leaders to realize how important education is - they already know it - their own children are in good schools. Now it is time to call them to take action.
If people volunteered in the same way to construct schools or roads or even clear the river of plastic wrappers, by God, Pakistan would become a paradise within a year.
In some parts of the world, students are going to school every day. It's their normal life. But in other part of the world, we are starving for education... it's like a precious gift. It's like a diamond.
We are human behind and this part of our human nature that we don't learn the importance of anything until it's snatched from our hands. In Pakistan, when we were stopped from going to school, and that time I realized that education is very important, and education is the power for women. And that's why the terrorists are afraid of education. They do not want women to get education because then women will become more powerful.
In Pakistan, when we were stopped from going to school, at that time I realized that education ... Is the power for women, and that's why the terrorists are afraid of education
I don't mind if I have to sit on the floor at school. All I want is education. And I'm afraid of no one.