Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture – as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
Look at Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
The biggest crime in Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ is imposing your own dream upon someone else’s reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn’t see Lolita’s reality. He doesn’t see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream. Azar Nafisi Read Quote
