Quote

When I say that I am opposed to this budget, everyone says, Well, what do you think the United States should do? My response is, Why should the United States do anything?

Akbar Ganji

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Akbar Ganji
Age: 54
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Ghazvin
Akbar Ganǧī
Well
Opposed
Think
Response
Thinking
Says
United
Everyone
States
Anything
Budget
Wells
Budgets

More quotes by Akbar Ganji

Image
Three of our provinces have seen mass uprisings. The three provinces are Khuzestan, Azerbaijan, and Kurdistan. Recently, we witnessed massive demonstration by Iranian woman in the 7th of Tir square, and it was brutally suppressed.
Akbar Ganji
Image
When there is a crisis, the first thing that gets damaged and gets harmed is democracy.
Akbar Ganji
Image
[In] every revolution, there is a great divergence between what the revolutionaries expect and what the revolution actually accomplishes.
Akbar Ganji
Image
The regime kept saying that all of my opponents are lackeys of the United States. We used to say that this is all lie, that we are lackeys of the United States.
Akbar Ganji
Image
I, too, am against the dismantlement of Iran.
Akbar Ganji
Image
I did join the Revolutionary Guard, but I was simply a simple Revolutionary Guard, never a commander.
Akbar Ganji
Image
I have spent six years in prison, the last six years. Even if I was outside the prison, how much actual space was there for an investigative journalist to do his work in Iran? But I know one thing for sure: That we, the Iranian people, are much more in line of danger than the West.
Akbar Ganji
Image
Religion is separate from the institution of the state.
Akbar Ganji
Image
Supporters of the national front, Mosaddeq, believe that in Iran, we don't have a nationalities problem, we don't have an ethnic problem. It is like living with your wife, with whom you are in love and you are intensely involved in, but you also have tensions. And their position is that they want to deny that these tensions exist.
Akbar Ganji
Image
There is no possibility of a public demonstration [in Iran] of such defiance, but these defiant acts are certainly going on.
Akbar Ganji
Image
We must struggle for creating a democratic system that is dedicated to democracy and human rights.
Akbar Ganji
Image
Khomeini obviously had many problems, but he had one clever side to him. He never made economic promises to people and as a result, he never led to dissatisfaction in this perspective. Because they need to get votes, they use misleading slogans. And this leads to rising expectations. I had a personal experience.
Akbar Ganji
Image
The Revolutionary Guard was created to help defend the revolution, but it soon was diverted from its initial path.
Akbar Ganji
Image
You cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it.
Akbar Ganji
Image
It was universal pressure on the regime to secure my release. International pressure was certainly helpful in my release.
Akbar Ganji
Image
In the West, when all of these reactors, nuclear reactors, are matters...part of the public domain, there are all kinds of supervision over them. We see that the ecological movement, environmentalist movement, organizes all kinds of demonstrations against these. They lie on railroads, they tie themselves to the gates.
Akbar Ganji
Image
If you look at the discourse before the revolution, whether it is the left communist, whether it is the right secularist...the entirety of this discourse was such that it encouraged the kind of ascendancy for a man like Ayatollah Khomeini.
Akbar Ganji
Image
When I was on my hunger strike, and I was in a hospital, the guards who inflicted all manner of injustice against me, and all manner of hardship...I could witness that as a result of Ahmadinejad, they lived in a dream. They believed that paradise is around the corner and that all their demands shall be met.
Akbar Ganji
Image
It began early in the revolution. It was a process that was unfolding on a daily basis. We expected the system to be dispensing justice, but every day that passed by, we recognized that the justice we expected and hoped for was not about to be achieved.
Akbar Ganji
Image
The ecological movement is concerned about this, and this is in here, where everything is public. In Iran, where everything is covert, we have no firsthand information.
Akbar Ganji