#ira

People ask me to record their answering machines all the time. I love it. It's a miracle to me that people want to hear back those characters. ↗

— Mike Myers

#ask #back #characters #hear #i

I know that throughout their history, the people of the United States defended their freedom, their liberty, their justice, and their rights - if need be - with their lives. I think their courage is so admirable. ↗

— Lee Myung-bak

#courage #defended #freedom #history #i

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#book #boy #composed #conceived #girl

Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no matter how benign their intentions, present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries, as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#also #benign #choice #condescending #countries

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry? ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#apologists #ask #centuries #culture #degrades

For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#dismiss #iran #islamic #more #part

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#american literature #degree #english #finally #got

In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#criticism #culture #especially #in the past #iran

The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#democracy #determined #fascism #freedom #fundamentalism

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#deprived #history #iranian #just #past