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It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

Azar Nafisi

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Azar Nafisi
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Cause
Takes
Causes
Dies
Also
Live
Tehran
Courage

More quotes by Azar Nafisi

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Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
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We in ancient countries have our past- we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.
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America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
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I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.
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That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas.
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Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.
Azar Nafisi
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Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new ones.
Azar Nafisi
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Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
Azar Nafisi
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The revolution taught me not to be consoled by other people's miseries, not to feel thankful because so many others had suffered more. Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal they cannot be modified by comparison to others.
Azar Nafisi
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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
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The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
Azar Nafisi
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When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.
Azar Nafisi
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The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.
Azar Nafisi
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Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
Azar Nafisi
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With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
Azar Nafisi
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The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people’s actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.
Azar Nafisi
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Art is as useful as bread.
Azar Nafisi
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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
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A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
Azar Nafisi
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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